Résumé

vLLM: Scale-out disaggregated multimodal transport trusts caller-supplied features

Détails de l’avis

Affected

  • Ecosystem / package: pip / vllm
  • Affected versions: vLLM ≤ 0.25.1 (confirmed on 0.25.1, commit 752a3a504485). The lower bound predates 0.25.1; maintainers can confirm how far back the scale-out transport path reaches.

Summary

vLLM's disaggregated scale-out transport splits a multimodal request into a trusted render step (POST /v1/chat/completions/render) and a separate generate step (POST /inference/v1/generate). The generate route decodes a caller-supplied features object — serialized encoder tensors (kwargs_data), multimodal hashes (mm_hashes), placeholder ranges (mm_placeholders), and the internal field-processor selection — and forwards it into the engine as if it had come from the trusted renderer, with no rebinding to (or validation against) the active model's renderer contract. Because the two routes are ordinary auth-guarded HTTP endpoints (the /inference prefix is registered by default on generate-capable servers), any authenticated caller can submit an otherwise-valid render body with a single forged field.

Depending on which field is forged, this produces:

  • an engine-fatal crash of the shared EngineCore process (denial of service), reproduced as a CUDA illegal-memory-access, a post-admission rank-mismatch ValueError, and a hard assert — three independent forged fields (sites 1, 2, 3);
  • silent cross-request encoder-cache poisoning / disclosure of shared encoder state when the cache-key hash is not bound to the payload (site 4);
  • transport-level integrity loss when sparse placeholder masks are dropped during render-to-generate replay (site 5).

All five share one root cause and one fix shape: the reconstructed multimodal state on the scale-out path is trusted without being rebound to, and validated against, the active model's renderer output before it reaches the engine.

These sites are distinct from prior multimodal hardening. Site 1 survives GHSA-wv77-2vpf-vmmg (that fix validates full tensor shape in MultiModalDataParser/get_input_embeddings on the prompt-embeds path), because our request forges image_grid_thw metadata with the pixel bytes intact and reaches the Qwen2 vision RoPE/cu_seqlens and image_embeds.split sink, which the shape-check fix does not rebind. Site 4 is distinct from GHSA-c65p-x677-fgj6 (which folds metadata into MultiModalHasher.serialize_item to stop hash collisions), because the scale-out generate path trusts a caller-supplied mm_hash as the cache key with no origin binding, so that fix does not stop a caller from submitting a victim's hash or a kwargs_data=None cache read.

Affected code

Links pinned to the confirmed commit 752a3a504485 (v0.25.1).

Shared entry point and control surface for all five sites:

Site 1 — forged Qwen grid geometry (engine-fatal DoS). The decoded image_grid_thw is never rebound to the rendered pixel-tensor element count.

The only shape check is assert grid_thw.ndim == 2; the split sizes and the vision-encoder call are then derived directly from the caller-supplied grid, with no cross-check against the pixel-tensor row count:

# vllm/model_executor/models/qwen2_vl.py Lines 1348-1369
    def _process_image_input(
        self, image_input: Qwen2VLImageInputs
    ) -> tuple[torch.Tensor, ...]:
        grid_thw = image_input["image_grid_thw"]
        assert grid_thw.ndim == 2

        if image_input["type"] == "image_embeds":
            image_embeds = image_input["image_embeds"]
        else:
            pixel_values = image_input["pixel_values"]

            if self.use_data_parallel:
                return run_dp_sharded_mrope_vision_model(
                    self.visual, pixel_values, grid_thw.tolist(), rope_type="rope_3d"
                )
            else:
                image_embeds = self.visual(pixel_values, grid_thw=grid_thw)

        # Split concatenated embeddings for each image item.
        merge_size = self.visual.spatial_merge_size
        sizes = (grid_thw.prod(-1) // merge_size // merge_size).tolist()
        return image_embeds.split(sizes)

Site 2 — wire-selected field-processor type confusion (engine-fatal DoS). MsgpackDecoder._decode_mm_field_elem() trusts a wire-selected field-factory name and constructs the internal field processor directly from caller data.

Références