Impact

Multer is vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) via deeply nested field names in multipart form data. The append-field dependency parses bracket notation in field names (e.g., a[b][c]) with no limit on nesting depth, allowing an attacker to force allocation of deeply nested object structures that consume CPU and memory. A single HTTP request with a crafted multipart body is sufficient to exploit this.

Patches

Users should upgrade to 2.2.0 and configure limits.fieldNestingDepth to the minimum depth their application requires.

Workarounds

Set limits.fields to a reasonable value to reduce the number of fields an attacker can send per request. This does not fully mitigate the issue but limits the impact.