CVE-2026-44223
MediumCVSS 6.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk28th percentile - higher than 28% of all known CVEs
Summary
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models. From versions 0.18.0 to before 0.20.0, the extract_hidden_states function in vLLM returns a tensor with an incorrect shape after the first decode step, leading to a RuntimeError and crashing the EngineCore process.
Risk Assessment
Server crashes can lead to service downtime related to language models, affecting the organization's operational continuity. A single request with a penalty parameter is sufficient to trigger a crash.
Recommendation
It is recommended to update vLLM to version 0.20.0 to mitigate this vulnerability. Additionally, monitor the use of penalty parameters in requests.
Other vulnerabilities in vLLM
See all- CVE-2026-48746Critical
Vulnerability in vLLM versions 0.3.0 to 0.22.0 allows bypass of OpenAI API AuthenticationMiddleware. An attacker can use the API without providing the configured VLLM_API_KEY or --api-key.
- CVE-2026-22778Critical
A vulnerability in vLLM from version 0.8.3 to 0.14.0 leaks a heap address when an invalid image is sent to the multimodal endpoint. This leak reduces ASLR effectiveness from 4 billion to about 8 guesses, facilitating further attacks.
- CVE-2026-115918Medium
vLLM from 0.16.0 until 0.32.0 allows an authenticated caller to place an attacker-controlled template in chat_template_kwargs[chat_template] when no server template is configured. ChatParams.get_apply_chat_template_kwargs() preserves that value without enforcing trust_request_chat_template, bypassing the trust policy and causing CPU or memory exhaustion through Jinja rendering.
- CVE-2026-115917Low
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models. Prior to 0.32.0, the OpenAI-compatible server configures Starlette CORSMiddleware with allowed_origins set to a wildcard by default. A malicious web page can use a victim's browser to reach an unauthenticated vLLM server on localhost, an internal network, or a VPN, call endpoints including GET /v1/models and POST /v1/chat/completions, consume GPU resources, and read responses. This issue is fixed in version 0.32.0.
- CVE-2026-115916Medium
vLLM before 0.32.0, in vllm/tokenizers/hf.py, computes max_token_id with an off-by-one upper bound, allowing a pre-tokenized prompt ID equal to the vocabulary size to pass validation. For tensor-parallel size one and an exact multiple-of-64 vocabulary, VocabParallelEmbedding.forward does not mask that value before F.embedding uses it, causing a CUDA device-side assertion and terminating the engine.
- CVE-2026-115915High
Prior to 0.32.0, vLLM's ImageMediaIO passes attacker-controlled image bytes to Pillow through Image.open(BytesIO(data)) without restricting decoder selection, and the MIME label does not constrain the selected format. Image-capable request paths through parse_image() and fetch_image() can dispatch an EPS payload to host components; a host with Ghostscript affected by CVE-2024-29510 can execute commands with the vLLM process's privileges, while Pillow 12.0.0 through 12.2.0 can trigger CVE-2026-59203 and exhaust media-loading workers.
- CVE-2026-115914Medium
vLLM from 0.11.1 until 0.32.0, in the DeepSeek-OCR, DeepSeek-OCR-2, and Unlimited-OCR image path, allows a remote client reaching the OpenAI-compatible API to submit a legal image whose normalized pixels sum to zero when alone in its per-step encoder batch. _parse_and_validate_image_input returns no embedding, embed_multimodal propagates that value, and sanity_check_mm_encoder_outputs triggers a fatal assertion that shuts down the engine for all users.
- CVE-2026-115913Medium
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models. Prior to 0.32.0, the Phi-4 multimodal audio encoder in phi4mm_audio.py and phi4mm_utils.py uses eager attention by default, allowing a remote client to submit one long audio clip that materializes full attention matrices and causes quadratic GPU-memory use, leading to out-of-memory and termination of EngineCore for all users.
- CVE-2026-115912High
Prior to 0.32.0, an authenticated caller in vLLM can place forged shared-memory address and monotonic_id values in public multimodal features.kwargs_data. In scale-out deployments with shared-memory multimodal caching enabled, workers trust those values and pass attacker-selected bytes to pickle.loads(), allowing arbitrary Python execution even when insecure serialization is disabled.
- CVE-2026-115911Medium
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models. From 0.19.0 until 0.32.0, authenticated callers can supply a chat template when no server-side --chat-template is configured, or a malicious model repository can provide a template compiled and rendered by tokenizer.apply_chat_template() without a wall-clock timeout, output-size limit, or iteration bound. Rendering runs in a ThreadPoolExecutor with one worker, so a nonterminating render can block /v1/responses and other chat-template users, while an output-expanding render can exhaust server memory.
Original NVD description (English source)
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models (LLMs). From 0.18.0 to before 0.20.0, the extract_hidden_states speculative decoding proposer in vLLM returns a tensor with an incorrect shape after the first decode step, causing a RuntimeError that crashes the EngineCore process. The crash is triggered when any request in the batch uses sampling penalty parameters (repetition_penalty, frequency_penalty, or presence_penalty). A single request with a penalty parameter (e.g., "repetition_penalty": 1.1) is sufficient to crash the server. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.20.0.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

