vLLM, an inference and serving engine for large language models (LLMs), has an issue in versions 0.6.5 through 0.8.4 that ONLY impacts environments using the PyNcclPipe KV cache transfer integration with the V0 engine. No other configurations are affected. vLLM supports the use of the PyNcclPipe class to establish a peer-to-peer communication domain for data transmission between distributed nodes. The GPU-side KV-Cache transmission is implemented through the PyNcclCommunicator class, while CPU-side control message passing is handled via the send_obj and recv_obj methods on the CPU side. The intention was that this interface should only be exposed to a private network using the IP address specified by the --kv-ip CLI parameter. The vLLM documentation covers how this must be limited to a secured network. The default and intentional behavior from PyTorch is that the TCPStore interface listens on ALL interfaces, regardless of what IP address is provided. The IP address given was only used as a client-side address to use. vLLM was fixed to use a workaround to force the TCPStore instance to bind its socket to a specified private interface. As of version 0.8.5, vLLM limits the TCPStore socket to the private interface as configured.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.