GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in open-webui. A fix is available for open-webui — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Open WebUI: Instance-wide stall via automation recurrence rules that force multi-second parsing
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 GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c.
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
GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c 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 376,715 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
open-webuiReal-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
Summary
In every affected release, automation recurrence parsing anchors minutely and hourly rules at a fixed date of 2000-01-01 and then walks forward one interval at a time to find the next run. A single FREQ=MINUTELY rule therefore enumerates roughly a quarter-century of occurrences, synchronously, on the event loop that also serves the scheduler, HTTP and WebSocket traffic. Nothing bounds the walk, and nothing moves it off the loop.
Preconditions
Any user who can create an automation. USER_PERMISSIONS_FEATURES_AUTOMATIONS defaults to false, so on a default deployment only an admin can reach the create path; it becomes reachable by ordinary users on any deployment that has granted the automations feature, which is the normal way to make the feature usable. UVICORN_WORKERS defaults to 1, so there is no second worker to absorb the stall. The rule needs no unusual syntax: FREQ=MINUTELY with no DTSTART, or with a DTSTART set well in the past, is enough.
Impact
Availability, against every other user of the instance. One evaluation of RRULE:FREQ=MINUTELY takes 18.9 s of blocking CPU; adding a ten-value BYSECOND list multiplies the walk and takes 64.2 s. FREQ=HOURLY costs 0.34 s and is not materially exploitable on its own. The cost does not stop at creation: once the automation is stored, the scheduler recomputes the next run for every claimed row on each poll, so the same walk repeats on a default 10 s interval and the instance stays wedged rather than recovering. Instances that have not enabled the automations feature for non-admin users are exposed only to an admin doing this.
Fix
Fixed in 0.11.0. Sub-daily rules are now anchored to the current clock instead of the year-2000 date, so the walk starts at the next occurrence rather than a quarter-century behind it. A caller-supplied DTSTART is honoured only when the number of occurrences it implies stays under a fixed bound, and is otherwise replaced by the clock-aligned anchor. The same rules that cost 18.9 s and 64.2 s now cost under a millisecond. Upgrading fully resolves the issue, no configuration change is required.
Root cause
Affected component: backend/open_webui/utils/automations.py, _parse_rule, reached from the automation create, update and toggle handlers in backend/open_webui/routers/automations.py and from the scheduler's claim path in backend/open_webui/models/automations.py. Affected setup: every build from 0.9.0 onward, since that is when the automations feature shipped.
The fixed anchor existed to make sub-daily intervals snap to clock boundaries, so that "every 5 minutes" lands on :00, :05, :10 rather than drifting from whenever the automation happened to be created. Snapping only needs a reference point of the right phase, but the implementation used a literal far-past date as that reference and left the recurrence library to walk forward from it. The distance between the anchor and the present is therefore attacker-influenced work that grows with real time, and it was never treated as a cost that needed a bound or a thread.
Proof of concept
Measured cost of a single next-run computation against the shipped 0.10.2 parser:
| rule | cost |
|---|---|
RRULE:FREQ=MINUTELY | 18,880 ms |
RRULE:FREQ=MINUTELY;BYSECOND=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 | 64,236 ms |
DTSTART:20000101T000000 + RRULE:FREQ=MINUTELY | 26,237 ms |
RRULE:FREQ=HOURLY | 339 ms |
Measured at function level deliberately. Persisting such an automation has the scheduler repeat the walk on every poll and wedge the instance indefinitely, which is the actual impact but makes a live end-to-end run destructive to the test instance.
Credits
Reported by @Classic298.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | open-webui | ≥ 0.9.0&&< 0.11.0 | 0.11.0pip install --upgrade 'open-webui==0.11.0' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for open-webui, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update open-webui to 0.11.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c 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 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-73cq-mcgh-379c across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.