Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
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AccessReach public /v1/chat/completions endpoint
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DeliverySubmit crafted decompression-bomb image
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ExploitPillow decodes without pixel limit
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ExecutionWorker memory exhausted and OOM-killed
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ImpactService denied to co-tenants
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A06:2025 - Insecure Design
ASVS 5.0
V2 - Validation and Business Logic Resource consumption limits
MITRE ATT&CK
1 technique across 1 tactic: Impact The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Exploitation Conditions | Exploitation requires the vLLM instance to have imported a Nemotron-VL processor - i.e., it is serving a Nemotron-VL model or otherwise loads vllm/transformers_utils/processors/nemotron_vl.py or nano_nemotron_vl.py; the dangerous Image.MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS = None side effect only takes hold once that module is loaded. Given that, no authentication or user interaction is needed (CVSS PR:N/UI:N): any party able to reach the /v1/chat/completions endpoint can submit an attacker-controlled image. Limiting factors: deployments not loading a Nemotron-VL processor are not affected via this path; network reachability of the inference endpoint is required; and impact is confined to availability (worker OOM / DoS to co-tenants), with no confidentiality or integrity effect. |
| Impact | Signals align reasonably well. The CVSS 4.0 vector (AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N) describes an unauthenticated, low-complexity, remote attack with no attack-requirement caveats, and the impact is scoped purely to availability (VA:H, with VC/VI = N) - consistent with CWE-400 uncontrolled resource consumption and the described OOM-kill denial of service. This is a genuine availability issue, not a confidential/integrity breach, so the 8.7 score reflects a high-impact DoS rather than a system-compromise flaw. No CISA KEV listing and no EPSS score are present in the input, so exploitation-probability data is MISSING; absence of EPSS/KEV does not mean low risk here, but it means widespread active exploitation is not confirmed. There is no verified public exploit code - only vendor/VulnCheck advisories. The vuln.today decision label is 'this_week' (prioritize, but not act_now/emergency). The key limiting factor NOT captured by the network/unauth CVSS metrics is that exploitation requires the target to be serving a Nemotron-VL model or to otherwise have imported the Nemotron-VL processor module, which narrows the real exploitable population considerably - verify whether your deployment loads these processors before treating this as broadly exploitable. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | An unauthenticated attacker reaches the public /v1/chat/completions endpoint of a vLLM instance that has loaded a Nemotron-VL processor and submits a pathological decompression-bomb image (a small file that expands to enormous pixel dimensions). Because the processor has globally set Image.MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS = None, Pillow's bomb guard is disabled, so decoding the image exhausts memory and OOM-kills the worker, denying service to co-tenants on the same process. No verified public exploit code is identified; only vendor/VulnCheck advisories exist, though the technique (image decompression bomb) is well understood and low-complexity. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Oct 25, 2026
Memory exhaustion in vLLM's Nemotron-VL processor path allows unauthenticated remote callers to OOM-kill the inference worker and deny service to co-tenants. The Nemotron-VL processor modules set Pillow's Image.MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS to None at import time, permanently disabling the process-global decompression-bomb guard for every image decode in that process, so a pathological image submitted to /v1/chat/completions expands into unbounded memory. Exposure is limited to deployments that serve a Nemotron-VL model or otherwise import the affected processor modules, and the vendor fix ships in vLLM 0.25.0 via PR #47010; no public exploit code has been identified at time of analysis, and scoring is availability-only (CVSS 4.0 base 8.7, PR:N/UI:N).
RemediationAI
Vendor-released patch: vLLM 0.25.0, delivered by PR #47010, which removes both module-level Image.MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS = None assignments and adds a decoded pixel-count limit in the shared image loader configurable through VLLM_MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS - upgrade to 0.25.0 or later and set VLLM_MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS to a bounded value appropriate for your workload so the guard cannot be globally disabled again. No standalone configuration toggle removes the effect on unpatched builds, because the guard is disabled at module import, so the interim control is network scoping: the endpoint requires no authentication (CVSS PR:N), therefore restrict /v1/chat/completions to trusted clients with authentication and rate/size limits at the proxy and cap request body sizes, accepting that this reduces intended multi-tenant accessibility; deployments that do not serve a Nemotron-VL model and never import those processor modules are not exposed via this path and can defer to their normal upgrade cycle. Details and patched-version confirmation are in advisory GHSA-mm38-5g96-7j6x, with corroborating analysis in the VulnCheck advisory.
Affected VersionsENISA
Affected Packages
Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)
Affects your stack
Affects 1 package in euvd
Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
The root cause is an uncontrolled resource consumption flaw (CWE-400) created by a module-level side effect rather than by a specific request handler. vllm/transformers_utils/processors/nemotron_vl.py and nano_nemotron_vl.py each assign Image.MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS = None unconditionally when imported, which disables Pillow's decompression-bomb defence for the entire process lifetime, not just for Nemotron-VL processing. The reachable sink is the image ingestion path used by the OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint: MediaConnector.load_from_url passes attacker-supplied bytes to ImageMediaIO.load_bytes, which opens and decodes the image; with the pixel cap removed, a highly compressed image can be decoded into a very large in-memory bitmap. Because the setting is process-global, unrelated Image.open() calls in the same worker inherit the weakened guard. The issue was reproduced on vLLM 0.8.5 (commit feffb51d3f) and the same sink was observed on main at 1a096d8208; the trigger requires the vulnerable module to have been imported, and the sources do not describe any additional precondition beyond that and network reachability of the inference endpoint.
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Severity by source
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Remote unauthenticated image submission with no interaction (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N); impact is availability-only worker OOM (A:H), no confidentiality or integrity effect; scope unchanged.
Primary rating from Vendor (VulnCheck).
CVSS VectorVendor: VulnCheck
Lifecycle Timeline
2DescriptionCVE.org
vLLM from 0.10.2 before 0.25.0 contains an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to exhaust memory because the Nemotron-VL processors globally set Image.MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS to None. Attackers can submit a pathological decompression-bomb image to /v1/chat/completions to OOM-kill the worker and deny service to co-tenants.
Technical POC Analysis
CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption), specifically a process-global security-control bypass that enables decompression-bomb memory exhaustion.
Full technical POC analysis - root cause, step-by-step exploitation and patch breakdown - is part of the Pro and Business plans.
Executive ViewAI
A high-severity memory exhaustion vulnerability in vLLM's Nemotron-VL processor path enables unauthenticated remote attackers to crash inference workers, causing denial of service to co-tenants. Organizations hosting Nemotron-VL models face operational disruption and potential SLA breaches, impacting service availability for all users of the affected inference environment.
No vendor-released patch identified at time of analysis; interim mitigations include network segmentation to limit unauthenticated access, application-layer image size and dimension checks, and memory monitoring to detect and restart affected workers.
Threat Intelligence Overview
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Denial of Service attacks render applications or systems unavailable by overwhelming resources or triggering failure conditions.
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Out-of-memory worker crashes in vLLM can be induced by a single small compressed audio payload submitted to the /v1/chat
vLLM is a high-throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving engine for LLMs. Rated medium severity (CVSS 6.5),
GPU memory exhaustion in vLLM versions prior to 0.28.0 lets an attacker with low-privileged API access (PR:L in the CVSS
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Uncontrolled resource consumption in vLLM's OpenAI-compatible completions endpoint allows any authenticated API client t
EUVD-2026-109438
GHSA-p9gm-63qh-x2pq
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
Exploit-DB