CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-24536 — Multipart form parsing can consume large amounts of CPU and memory when processing form inputs containing very large numbers of parts

High CVSS 7.5

Multipart form parsing can consume large amounts of CPU and memory when processing form inputs containing very large numbers of parts. This stems from several causes: 1. mime/multipart.Reader.ReadForm limits the total memory a parsed multipart form can consume. ReadForm can undercount the amount of memory consumed, leading it to accept larger inputs than intended. 2. Limiting total memory does not account for increased pressure on the garbage collector from large numbers of small allocations in forms with many parts. 3. ReadForm can allocate a large number of short-lived buffers, further increasing pressure on the garbage collector. The combination of these factors can permit an attacker to cause an program that parses multipart forms to consume large amounts of CPU and memory, potentially resulting in a denial of service. This affects programs that use mime/multipart.Reader.ReadForm, as well as form parsing in the net/http package with the Request methods FormFile, FormValue, ParseMultipartForm, and PostFormValue. With fix, ReadForm now does a better job of estimating the memory consumption of parsed forms, and performs many fewer short-lived allocations. In addition, the fixed m…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-04-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • golang / go

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.