The parse options header() function in multipart.py uses a regular expression with an ambiguous alternation, which can cause exponential backtracking (ReDoS) when parsing maliciously crafted HTTP or multipart segment headers. This can be abused for denial of service (DoS) attacks against web applications using this library to parse request headers or multipart/form-data streams.

Any WSGI or ASGI application using multipart.parse form data() directly or indirectly (e.g. while parsing multipart/form-data streams) is vulnerable. The slow-down is significant enough to block request handling threads for multiple seconds per request.

All versions up to and including 1.3.0 are affected. The issue is fixed in 1.2.2, 1.3.1 and 1.4.0-dev.