CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-31994 — Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner

Medium CVSS 6.5

Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner. Prior to 1.4.0, an attacker can point the image request to an arbitrarily large file. Mealie will attempt to retrieve this file in whole. If it can be retrieved, it may be stored on the file system in whole (leading to possible disk consumption), however the more likely scenario given resource limitations is that the container will OOM during file retrieval if the target file size is greater than the allocated memory of the container. At best this can be used to force the container to infinitely restart due to OOM (if so configured in `docker-compose.yml), or at worst this can be used to force the Mealie container to crash and remain offline. In the event that the file can be retrieved, the lack of rate limiting on this endpoint also permits an attacker to generate ongoing requests to any target of their choice, potentially contributing to an external-facing DoS attack. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.4.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-04-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • mealie / mealie

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

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