Tornado is Vulnerable to Quadratic DoS via Repeated Header Coalescing
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.5epss 0.6%
exploitation probability
0.6%top 57% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
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 6.5.3.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
tornadoweb · tornado