Tornado before 6.5.9 StaticFileHandler Path Traversal via Symlink
Tornado before 6.5.9 contains a path traversal vulnerability in StaticFileHandler that follows symbolic links inside the static root without confirming the resolved target stays within it. When a symlink pointing outside the static directory exists inside it, unauthenticated attackers can request it to read files such as configuration files, private keys, and application secrets accessible to the process user.
Tornado before 6.5.9 Denial of Service via CurlAsyncHTTPClient
Tornado versions before 6.5.9 contain an unbounded memory accumulation vulnerability in CurlAsyncHTTPClient that allows remote attackers to cause denial of service by sending a compressed response. Attackers can send a gzip-encoded decompression bomb that accumulates in memory without size limits, causing the application process to be killed by out-of-memory conditions.
Tornado before 6.5.9 Denial of Service via Query String
Tornado before 6.5.9 fails to limit the number of query string fields in HTTPServerRequest.__init__, allowing remote attackers to cause event-loop stalling by sending requests with thousands of query parameters. Attackers can send unauthenticated GET requests with unbounded query-string field counts to degrade response times for all clients sharing the same IOLoop.
Tornado before 6.5.7 Credential Leak via Handle Reuse
Tornado before 6.5.7 contains a credential leak vulnerability in CurlAsyncHTTPClient where pycurl handles are reused across requests without proper state clearing. Attackers can obtain sensitive credentials by issuing requests through the same client instance, allowing TLS certificates or proxy authentication to persist across unintended requests.
Tornado before 6.5.8 Cookie Attribute Injection via Capitalized kwargs
Tornado before 6.5.8 contains an incomplete fix for cookie attribute injection that allows attackers to inject arbitrary cookie attributes by passing capitalized or legacy keyword arguments to set_cookie. Attackers can embed semicolon-delimited data in capitalized parameters like Domain, Path, or SameSite to bypass validation and modify cookie security attributes.
Tornado before 6.5.8 Memory Amplification DoS via multipart
Tornado before 6.5.8 contains a memory amplification vulnerability in parse_multipart_form_data that splits multipart data before validating the max_parts limit. Attackers can send crafted multipart requests with many parts to create large transient lists, exhausting server memory and causing denial of service.
Tornado before 6.4.1 CRLF Injection via CurlAsyncHTTPClient
Tornado before 6.4.1 contains a CRLF injection vulnerability in CurlAsyncHTTPClient that fails to reject carriage return and line feed characters in request headers. Attackers can inject CRLF sequences into header values to inject arbitrary headers or construct entirely new HTTP requests.
Tornado before 6.4.1 HTTP Request Smuggling via Transfer-Encoding
Tornado before 6.4.1 ignores duplicate Transfer-Encoding: chunked headers, treating requests as having no message body and parsing the chunked body as a subsequent request. Attackers can exploit this inconsistency when Tornado is deployed behind proxies to perform HTTP request smuggling, enabling access control bypass, cache poisoning, or connection desynchronization.
Tornado before 6.3.3 HTTP Request Smuggling via Content-Length
Tornado before 6.3.3 contains an HTTP request smuggling vulnerability due to improper parsing of Content-Length headers accepting non-standard characters. Attackers can send crafted HTTP requests with these characters to bypass proxy validation and smuggle requests when deployed behind certain proxies.
Tornado: Urlencoded body parsing omits max_num_fields, so one request can stall the event loop
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Prior to 6.5.8, Tornado parses application/x-www-form-urlencoded request bodies with urllib.parse.parse_qs in tornado/escape.py without passing max_num_fields. RequestHandler._execute in tornado/web.py parses the body before handler dispatch through HTTPServerRequest._parse_body and parse_body_arguments in tornado/httputil.py, so an unauthenticated request body containing millions of separator-delimited fields can synchronously stall the single-threaded event loop and delay every connection. The body is bounded only by max_buffer_size, which defaults to 104857600 bytes. Th
tornado AsyncHTTPClient accumulates decompressed chunks without size limit (gzip bomb)
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Prior to 6.5.6, Tornado gzip decompression routines processed limited-size chunks but did not enforce an overall limit on accumulated decompressed chunks, allowing a malicious server accessed by SimpleAsyncHTTPClient or an HTTPServer configured with decompress_request=True to consume effectively unlimited memory. This issue is fixed in version 6.5.6.
Tornado: Out-of-bounds memory access in C extension
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Prior to 6.5.6, the optional native extension tornado.speedups implemented websocket_mask without validating that the mask argument is exactly four bytes, allowing the C function to read up to three bytes beyond the provided buffer when reached through Tornado XSRF token decoding with the native extension active. This issue is fixed in version 6.5.6.
Tornado: Authorization header forwarded across cross-origin redirects in SimpleAsyncHTTPClient
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Prior to 6.5.6, SimpleAsyncHTTPClient shallow-copied redirected requests and removed only the Host header, leaving Authorization, auth_username, auth_password, and auth_mode in place when a redirect changed scheme, host, or port. This issue is fixed in version 6.5.6.
In Tornado before 6.5.5, cookie attribute injection could occur because the domain, path, and samesite arguments to .RequestHandler.set_cookie were not checked for crafted characters.
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. In versions of Tornado prior to 6.5.5, the only limit on the number of parts in multipart/form-data is the max_body_size setting (default 100MB). Since parsing occurs synchronously on the main thread, this creates the possibility of denial-of-service due to the cost of parsing very large multipart bodies with many parts. This vulnerability is fixed in 6.5.5.
Tornado is Vulnerable to Quadratic DoS via Crafted Multipart Parameters
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Versions 6.5.2 and below use an inefficient algorithm when parsing parameters for HTTP header values, potentially causing a DoS. The _parseparam function in httputil.py is used to parse specific HTTP header values, such as those in multipart/form-data and repeatedly calls string.count() within a nested loop while processing quoted semicolons. If an attacker sends a request with a large number of maliciously crafted parameters in a Content-Disposition header, the server's CPU usage increases quadratically (O(n²)) during parsing. Due to Tornado's single event loop architectu
Tornado is Vulnerable to Quadratic DoS via Repeated Header Coalescing
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. In versions 6.5.2 and below, a single maliciously crafted HTTP request can block the server's event loop for an extended period, caused by the HTTPHeaders.add method. The function accumulates values using string concatenation when the same header name is repeated, causing a Denial of Service (DoS). Due to Python string immutability, each concatenation copies the entire string, resulting in O(n²) time complexity. The severity can vary from high if max_header_size has been increased from its default, to low if it has its default value of 64KB. This issue is fixed in version
Tornado vulnerable to Header Injection and XSS via reason argument
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. In versions 6.5.2 and below, the supplied reason phrase is used unescaped in HTTP headers (where it could be used for header injection) or in HTML in the default error page (where it could be used for XSS) and can be exploited by passing untrusted or malicious data into the reason argument. Used by both RequestHandler.set_status and tornado.web.HTTPError, the argument is designed to allow applications to pass custom "reason" phrases (the "Not Found" in HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found) to the HTTP status line (mainly for non-standard status codes). This issue is fixed in version 6.5
Tornado vulnerable to excessive logging caused by malformed multipart form data
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. When Tornado's ``multipart/form-data`` parser encounters certain errors, it logs a warning but continues trying to parse the remainder of the data. This allows remote attackers to generate an extremely high volume of logs, constituting a DoS attack. This DoS is compounded by the fact that the logging subsystem is synchronous. All versions of Tornado prior to 6.5.0 are affected. The vulnerable parser is enabled by default. Upgrade to Tornado version 6.50 to receive a patch. As a workaround, risk can be mitigated by blocking `Content-Type: multipart/form-data` in a proxy.
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. The algorithm used for parsing HTTP cookies in Tornado versions prior to 6.4.2 sometimes has quadratic complexity, leading to excessive CPU consumption when parsing maliciously-crafted cookie headers. This parsing occurs in the event loop thread and may block the processing of other requests. Version 6.4.2 fixes the issue.