Medium severity · published Jun 22, 2026
CVE-2026-54236
vLLM: incomplete CVE-2026-22778 fix leaks PIL repr addresses via Anthropic router
5.3
CVSS
0.9%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models (LLMs). Prior to 0.23.1rc0, the fix for CVE-2026-22778, which introduced a sanitize_message helper that strips object-repr memory addresses from error messages before they reach the client, is incomplete: several response paths echo str(exc) directly to clients without calling sanitize_message. The unsanitized sites include the Anthropic API router in vllm/entrypoints/anthropic/api_router.py (the POST /v1/messages and POST /v1/messages/count_tokens handlers), the Server-Sent Events streaming converter in vllm/entrypoints/anthropic/serving.py, and the realtime speech-to-text WebSocket in vllm/entrypoints/speech_to_text/realtime/connection.py. These paths catch the exception inside the route coroutine and construct the JSONResponse themselves, bypassing the sanitizing global FastAPI exception handler, and WebSocket frames do not traverse that handler chain at all. Using the same primitive as the parent issue, an unauthenticated attacker can send malformed image bytes through the Anthropic Messages API image content parts so that PIL.Image.open raises an UnidentifiedImageError whose message contains the BytesIO object repr, leaking the heap memory address verbatim in the error.message field of the response body. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.23.1rc0.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
None
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.9% · higher than 60% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
VL
vllm · vllm-project
< 0.23.1rc0 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-54236
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-54236
Patch
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/commit/94923629729381d7f7c9efde72071a2441f7fd82
Issue Tracking
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/45119
Exploit
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/security/advisories/GHSA-hgg8-fqqc-vfmw
More from vllm
9.8
CVE-2026-115915
vLLM: Untrusted EPS inputs can trigger denial of service or Ghostscript RCE
9.8
CVE-2026-25960
SSRF Protection Bypass in vLLM
9.8
CVE-2026-22778
vLLM leaks a heap address when PIL throws an error
9.8
CVE-2026-22807
vLLM affected by RCE via auto_map dynamic module loading during model initialization
9.8
CVE-2024-9053
vllm-project vllm version 0.6.0 contains a vulnerability in the AsyncEngineRPCServer() RPC server entrypoints
