Tornado is Vulnerable to Quadratic DoS via Crafted Multipart Parameters
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 6.5.3
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
- Exploitation: none
- Automatable: yes
- Technical impact: partial
Summary
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 architecture, a single malicious request can cause the entire server to become unresponsive for an extended period. This issue is fixed in version 6.5.3.
Timeline
- CVE published
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- tornadoweb tornado
fixed in 6.5.3
- tornadoPyPI
fixed in 6.5.3