Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability · GHSA-7vcx-mhxq-9j96

Denial of service via image-transform endpoint accepting unvalidated target dimensions

Published Aug 20, 2026 · catalog updated Aug 20, 2026 · Denial of service via

Last checked Nov 1, 2026. A connected source was read within the last 7 days.

Open the advisory

Exploitation likelihood is not on this record for GHSA-7vcx-mhxq-9j96. A missing EPSS score is not a low risk. Compare Denial of service via with the linked advisory before you change production.

Severity

High7.5

Known exploitation

Not in CISA/VulnCheck KEV

EPSS

Awaiting synchronization with FIRST

Remediation

Version ranges on file

Affected products

npm directus

## Summary Denial of service on in Directus. The transform-eligibility check in validates only the source image's stored dimensions against (default ). The user-supplied target dimensions in the and query parameters are passed to Sharp's resize operation with no equivalent cap, so a tiny source image can be transformed into a very large raster, materialising a gigabyte-scale RGBA pixel buffer per request. On deployments that have configured any of the four branding-image fields ( , , , ), the transform endpoint is reachable by an unauthenticated attacker, because those fields are exempt from the normal access check and their identifiers are disclosed by the unauthenticated endpoint. On other deployments, exploitation requires an authenticated account with on at least one image. ## Details The eligibility check compares the source image's stored width and height against and rejects transforms when either source axis exceeds the limit. No equivalent validation is applied to the requested output dimensions before they reach Sharp, and is only honoured when the caller explicitly enables it. As a result, a request for output far larger than the source (for example, a 1x1 source rendered at 20000x20000) is accepted and allocates a multi-gigabyte pixel buffer before the per-transform timeout (default ) fires. requests trigger the full transform while transferring no response body, so the server-side cost is unchanged while the attacker's bandwidth cost is effectively zero. The concurrent transform queue is bounded by (default ), giving a theoretical worst-case allocation on the order of tens of gigabytes under sustained load; on under-provisioned hosts the Node process is OOM-killed well before that. There is no rate limiter on in the default configuration ( ). ## Impact A remote attacker can issue small HTTP requests (including ) that each cause the Directus process to allocate gigabyte-sized image buffers and saturate CPU cores, degrading or denying service for legitimat