vLLM: Unauthenticated OOM Denial of Service via Unbounded `n` Parameter in OpenAI API Server

Summary

A Denial of Service vulnerability exists in the vLLM OpenAI-compatible API server. Due to the lack of an upper bound validation on the n parameter in the ChatCompletionRequest and CompletionRequest Pydantic models, an unauthenticated attacker can send a single HTTP request with an astronomically large n value. This completely blocks the Python asyncio event loop and causes immediate Out-Of-Memory crashes by allocating millions of request object copies in the heap before the request even reaches the scheduling queue.

Details

The root cause of this vulnerability lies in the missing upper bound checks across the request parsing and asynchronous scheduling layers:

1. Protocol Layer: In vllm/entrypoints/openai/chat_completion/protocol.py, the n parameter is defined simply as an integer without any pydantic.Field constraints for an upper bound.

class ChatCompletionRequest(OpenAIBaseModel):
    # Ordered by official OpenAI API documentation
    # https://platform.openai.com/docs/api/reference/chat/create
    messages: list[ChatCompletionMessageParam]
    model: str | None = None
    frequency_penalty: float | None = 0.0
    logit_bias: dict[str, float] | None = None
    logprobs: bool | None = False
    top_logprobs: int | None = 0
    max_tokens: int | None = Field(
        default=None,
        deprecated="max_tokens is deprecated in favor of "
        "the max_completion_tokens field",
    )
    max_completion_tokens: int | None = None
    n: int | None = 1
    presence_penalty: float | None = 0.0

1. SamplingParams Layer (Incomplete Validation): When the API request is converted to internal SamplingParams in vllm/sampling_params.py, the _verify_args method only checks the lower bound (self.n < 1), entirely omitting an upper bounds check.

    def _verify_args(self) -> None:
        if not isinstance(self.n, int):
            raise ValueError(f"n must be an int, but is of type {type(self.n)}")
        if self.n < 1:
            raise ValueError(f"n must be at least 1, got {self.n}.")

1. Engine Layer (The OOM Trigger): When the malicious request reaches the core engine (vllm/v1/engine/async_llm.py), the engine attempts to fan out the request n times to generate identical independent sequences within a synchronous loop.

        # Fan out child requests (for n>1).
        parent_request = ParentRequest(request)
        for idx in range(parent_params.n):
            request_id, child_params = parent_request.get_child_info(idx)
            child_request = request if idx == parent_params.n - 1 else copy(request)
            child_request.request_id = request_id
            child_request.sampling_params = child_params
            await self._add_request(
                child_request, prompt_text, parent_request, idx, queue
            )
        return queue