vLLM through 0.29.0 Resource Exhaustion via Ownerless Mooncake Transfer Placeholders

Advisories

vLLM through 0.29.0 Resource Exhaustion via Ownerless Mooncake Transfer Placeholders

severity: medium
date: 9/21/2026
Affecting: vllm <= 0.29.0
CVE: CVE-2026-94625
CWE: CWE-772 Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime
CVSS: 6.9
CVSS V4 Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
References: Pull Request #51236
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/blob/v0.29.0/vllm/distributed/kv_transfer/kv_connector/v1/mooncake/mooncake_connector.py#L1234-L1242
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm
Credit: Mingkai Yu, Jiapeng Li, Jiajia Liu
Description: vLLM through 0.29.0 contains a resource exhaustion vulnerability in MooncakeConnector where rejected prefill requests create ownerless transfer placeholders that are never reclaimed. Attackers can send rejected requests to exhaust sender task pools, causing valid requests to be delayed by up to 480 seconds while health checks continue returning success.

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