QuerystringParser treated ; as a field separator in application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies, in addition to &. The WHATWG URL standard, modern browsers, and Python's urllib.parse (since the CVE-2021-23336 fix) treat only & as a separator. This creates a parser differential: the same bytes are tokenized into different fields than a WHATWG compliant intermediary would produce, allowing an attacker to smuggle extra form fields past an upstream body inspecting component.
When parsing application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies, QuerystringParser located the field separator with a two step lookup: it first scanned the entire remaining buffer for &, and only when no & existed anywhere ahead did it fall back to scanning for ;. For a body that uses ; as the separator and contains no &, every field iteration performed a full failed & scan over the entire remaining buffer before locating the nearby …
parse_form() did not validate the Content-Length header before using it to bound its chunked read of the request body. A negative Content-Length turned the bounded read into a read-until-EOF, so the entire body was loaded into memory in a single read instead of in fixed-size chunks.
parse_options_header parsed Content-Disposition (and Content-Type) headers with email.message.Message, which transparently applies RFC 2231/5987 decoding. The extended parameter syntax (filename*=charset'lang'value, name*=…, and the filename0/filename1 continuation form) is decoded and surfaced under the bare filename/name key, and overrides the plain parameter when both are present. RFC 7578 §4.2 explicitly forbids the filename* form in multipart/form-data. Components that follow RFC 7578, or that do not implement RFC 2231/5987 decoding for multipart/form-data (WAFs, proxies, …
python-multipart has a denial of service vulnerability in multipart part header parsing. When parsing multipart/form-data, MultipartParser previously had no limit on the number of part headers or the size of an individual part header. An attacker could send a request with either many repeated headers without terminating the header block or a single very large header value, causing excessive CPU work before request rejection or completion.
A denial of service vulnerability exists when parsing crafted multipart/form-data requests with large preamble or epilogue sections.
A Path Traversal vulnerability exists when using non-default configuration options UPLOAD_DIR and UPLOAD_KEEP_FILENAME=True. An attacker can write uploaded files to arbitrary locations on the filesystem by crafting a malicious filename.