Summary

vLLM's /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint limits compressed upload size but not decoded PCM output. A 25MB OPUS file expands to ~14.9GB of float32 PCM at decode time. Tested on vLLM v0.19.0.

Details

SpeechToTextProcessor rejects uploads over VLLM_MAX_AUDIO_CLIP_FILESIZE_MB (default 25MB) based on compressed byte length, but the audio decoder in audio.py accumulates all decoded frames into memory with no size limit before returning:

# speech_to_text.py L184-189
if len(audio_data) / 1024 ** 2 > self.max_audio_filesize_mb:
    raise VLLMValidationError(...)
y, sr = load_audio(buf, sr=self.asr_config.sample_rate)  # decoded size unchecked

# audio.py L77-107
chunks: list[npt.NDArray] = []
for frame in container.decode(stream):
    chunks.append(frame.to_ndarray())
audio = np.concatenate(chunks, axis=-1).astype(np.float32)  # single contiguous allocation

A 25MB OPUS file at 6kbps encodes ~8.7 hours of audio. Decoding produces ~5.7GB of float32 PCM (232x amplification), and np.concatenate then allocates a second contiguous array, bringing peak RSS to ~14.9GB from a single request. SpeechToTextConfig.max_audio_clip_s (default 30s) applies only after the full decode and does not prevent the allocation.

Impact

An unauthenticated attacker can exhaust server memory with a small number of concurrent requests, each a valid upload within the documented size limit. Severity was assessed with reference to prior OOM vulnerability reports in vLLM.

Fix

A fix for this vulnerability was merged here: #44970