GHSA-44fp-w29j-9vj5 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-401 vulnerability in multer. A fix is available for multer — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Multer vulnerable to Denial of Service via memory leaks from unclosed streams
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-44fp-w29j-9vj5.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-44fp-w29j-9vj5 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 379,842 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
multernpmDescription
Impact
Multer <2.0.0 is vulnerable to a resource exhaustion and memory leak issue due to improper stream handling. When the HTTP request stream emits an error, the internal busboy stream is not closed, violating Node.js stream safety guidance.
This leads to unclosed streams accumulating over time, consuming memory and file descriptors. Under sustained or repeated failure conditions, this can result in denial of service, requiring manual server restarts to recover. All users of Multer handling file uploads are potentially impacted.
Patches
Users should upgrade to 2.0.0
Workarounds
None
References
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | multer | all versions | 2.0.0npm install multer@2.0.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for multer, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update multer to 2.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-44fp-w29j-9vj5 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-44fp-w29j-9vj5 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.