CVE-2026-55646 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in vllm. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2026-55646 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
vLLM speech-to-text endpoints allocate full upload before enforcing the audio file-size limit
Exploitation Status
Proof-of-concept exploit code exists
- CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-55646.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-55646 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 369,023 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
vllmReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models. From 0.22.0 to 0.23.0, the /v1/audio/transcriptions and /v1/audio/translations routes call request.file.read() to fully materialize an uploaded audio file into memory before vLLM checks the documented VLLM_MAX_AUDIO_CLIP_FILESIZE_MB compressed upload size limit (default 25 MB) later in the speech-to-text preprocessing step, so an API caller who can reach those routes can submit an oversized multipart upload and cause vLLM to allocate memory proportional to the uploaded file size before the request is rejected as too large, creating memory pressure or terminating the process depending on deployment resource limits. This issue is fixed in version 0.24.0.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | vllm | ≥ 0.22.0&&< 0.24.0 | 0.24.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for vllm. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update vllm to 0.24.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-55646 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2026-55646 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2026-55646. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-55646 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2026-55646 across PyPI dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.