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MediumVulnerabilityLLM-specific

GHSA-83vm-p52w-f9pw: vLLM: extract_hidden_states speculative decoding crashes server on any request with penalty parameters

Published
Record updated
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Affected
  • vllm >= 0.18.0, < 0.20.0
Fixed in
0.20.0
  • released April 27, 2026, 9 days before disclosure
Known exploitation
Not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog at the last check.
EPSS
0.4%

Summary

A shape regression in vLLM's extract_hidden_states speculative decoding proposer, introduced when the KV connector interface was refactored in PR #37013, causes a RuntimeError that crashes the EngineCore process. Any request containing repetition_penalty, frequency_penalty, or presence_penalty triggers the crash, affecting deployments from v0.18.0 through v0.19.1 inclusive.

Mitigation

Fixed in PR #38610, first included in vLLM v0.20.0 (the fix slices the return value to sampled_token_ids[:, :1]). Workarounds: upgrade to vLLM v0.20.0 or later; if upgrading is not possible, avoid extract_hidden_states as the speculative decoding method on affected versions; or reject or strip the penalty parameters from incoming requests at an API gateway before they reach vLLM.