CVE-2026-116578

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, a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, prior to 6.6 accepts obsolete HTTP line folding and repeatedly concatenates short continuation lines, causing quadratic CPU consumption on the IOLoop thread. An unauthenticated client can submit a header block with many obsolete line-folding continuations before application code runs, blocking other connections served by the process. The cost grows with max_header_size, and only availability is affected.

In Tornado before 6.6.0, HTTP/1.1 chunked transfer encoding decoding processes already-arrived body data without yielding to the event loop. A remote unauthenticated peer can send millions of one-byte chunks to monopolize the process event loop and stall every other connection served by that process. SimpleAsyncHTTPClient has the same event-loop behavior when reading a response from a malicious server.

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 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 6.5.7 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 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 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 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 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.