# CVE-2024-31994: Mealie vulnerable to a DoS in recipe image importer (GHSL-2023-228)

> Attackers can cause denial of service by forcing the application to download arbitrarily large files, leading to out-of-memory crashes or disk exhaustion.

- **Severity:** Medium 6.5 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Any signed-in user
- **Attackable:** Local or same network only
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** No
- **Published:** 19 Apr 2024
- **Updated:** 25 Oct 2024

## What is CVE-2024-31994?

CVE-2024-31994 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in mealie-recipes mealie, published on 19 Apr 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner. Prior to 1.4.0, an attacker can point the image request to an arbitrarily large file. Mealie will attempt to retrieve this file in whole. If it can be retrieved, it may be stored on the file system in whole (leading to possible disk consumption), however the more likely scenario given resource limitations is that the container will OOM during file retrieval if the target file size is greater than the allocated memory of the container. At best this can be used to force the container to infinitely restart due to OOM (if so configured in `docker-compose.yml), or at worst this can be used to force the Mealie container to crash and remain offline. In the event that the file can be retrieved, the lack of rate limiting on this endpoint also permits an attacker to generate ongoing requests to any target of their choice, potentially contributing to an external-facing DoS attack. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.4.0.

Weakness: CWE-770 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling), CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-31994?

It affects 1 product.


Products: Mealie Mealie.

## How do I fix CVE-2024-31994?

No fix has been published for CVE-2024-31994 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

## Is CVE-2024-31994 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-31994 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in mealie-recipes mealie

- [CVE-2022-34615](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2022-34615/): Weak cryptography in n/a (critical 9.8)
- [CVE-2025-56795](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-56795/): Cross-site scripting in n/a (critical 9.0)
- [CVE-2024-55073](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-55073/): Missing authorization in n/a (high 7.6)
- [CVE-2024-31992](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-31992/): Mealie contains a DoS vulnerability in recipe importer (medium 6.5)
- [CVE-2022-34621](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2022-34621/): Missing authorization in n/a (medium 6.5)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2024-31994 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2024-31994 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in mealie-recipes mealie, published on 19 Apr 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-31994 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: mealie-recipes mealie. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-31994/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-31994/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-31994
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-31994
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2024-31994

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-31994/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.