High · published October 22, 2026
Django REST framework is a toolkit for building Web APIs. From 3.6.4 until 3.18.2, JSONParser.parse in rest_framework/parsers.py uses the client-supplied Content-Type charset value with codecs.getreader, which accepts byte-transform codecs such as bz2_codec rather than only text encodings. A remote unauthenticated client can therefore cause a compressed JSON request body to be expanded after Django has enforced DATA_UPLOAD_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE against only the wire bytes, allowing a very small request to consume substantial per-worker memory. The default parser set is sufficient, and any reachable endpoint that accepts a JSON body is affected. This issue is fixed in version 3.18.2.