CVE-2023-54397

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 is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.

Security Fix(es):

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.(CVE-2023-54397)

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.(CVE-2024-14029)

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.(CVE-2024-58384)

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.(CVE-2026-91990)

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.(CVE-2026-91991)

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.(CVE-2026-91992)

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.

Security Fix(es):

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.(CVE-2023-54397)

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.(CVE-2024-14029)

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.(CVE-2024-58384)

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.(CVE-2026-91990)

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.(CVE-2026-91991)

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.(CVE-2026-91992)

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.

Security Fix(es):

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.(CVE-2023-54397)

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.(CVE-2024-14029)

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.(CVE-2024-58384)

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.(CVE-2026-91990)

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.(CVE-2026-91991)

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.(CVE-2026-91992)

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.

Security Fix(es):

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.(CVE-2023-54397)

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.(CVE-2024-14029)

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.(CVE-2024-58384)

When SimpleAsyncHTTPClient follows a 3xx redirect, it shallow-copies the original HTTPRequest, rewrites the URL, decrements max_redirects, and removes only the Host header. It does not clear Authorization, auth_username, auth_password, or auth_mode when the redirect target changes origin. As a result, credentials intended for one origin can be forwarded to a different origin when follow_redirects=True, which is the default. Beginning in Tornado 6.5.6, SimpleAsyncHTTPClient matches the default behavior of libcurl (and therefore CurlAsyncHTTPClient): When a redirect changes the scheme, host, or port of the url, the Authorization and Cookie headers will be removed when following the redirect.(CVE-2026-49853)

SummaryTornado's optional native extension tornado.speedups implements websocket_mask without validating that the mask argument is exactly four bytes long. The C function reads four bytes from mask unconditionally, even when Python passes a shorter byte string. This can read beyond the provided buffer, exposing up to 3 bytes of uninitialized memory.The behavior is reachable from Tornado's XSRF token decoder when xsrf_cookies=True and the native extension is active. ### MitigationsThis bug is fixed in Tornado 6.5.6. Prior to upgrading to this version, setting the environment variable TORNADO_EXTENSION=0 will disable the vulnerable code (at the expense of reducing websocket performance).(CVE-2026-49854)

Tornado's gzip decompression routines work in limited-size chunks, but have no overall limit for the total size of decompressed chunks that they will accumulate (There has always been a limit for the total compressed size). This allows a malicious server to consume effectively unlimited amounts of memory if it is accessed via SimpleAsyncHTTPClient in its default configuration. HTTPServer is not affected in its default configuration, but it is if decompress_request=True is set. This bug is fixed in Tornado 6.5.6. max_body_size is now checked both for the compressed and cumulative decompressed size of the response.(CVE-2026-49855)

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…

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.

TuxCare rebuilt tornado to address 6 CVEs. Fixed in 6.1.0.post2+tuxcare.

TuxCare rebuilt tornado to address 15 CVEs. Fixed in 5.1.1.post4+tuxcare.

Summary

Tornado interprets -, +, and _ in chunk length and Content-Length values, which are not allowed by the HTTP RFCs. This can result in request smuggling when Tornado is deployed behind certain proxies that interpret those non-standard characters differently. This is known to apply to older versions of haproxy, although the current release is not affected.

Details

Tornado uses the int constructor to parse the values of Content-Length headers and chunk lengths in the following locations:

tornado/http1connection.py:445

            self._expected_content_remaining = int(headers["Content-Length"])

tornado/http1connection.py:621

                content_length = int(headers["Content-Length"])  # type: Optional[int]

tornado/http1connection.py:671

            chunk_len = int(chunk_len_str.strip(), 16)

Because int("0_0") == int("+0") == int("-0") == int("0"), using the int constructor to parse and validate strings that should contain only ASCII digits is not a good strategy.

Root has patched GHSA-qppv-j76h-2rpx in the tornado package for Root:PyPI. Multiple fixed versions available.

This update for python-tornado6 fixes the following issues:

• CVE-2023-54397: Tornado before 6.3.3 contains an HTTP request smuggling vulnerability due to improper parsing of Content-Length headers accepting non-standard characters. At (bsc#1280689).
• CVE-2024-58384: CRLF injection in CurlAsyncHTTPClient headers (bsc#1281059).
• CVE-2026-91990: splitting of multipart data before validation of the max_parts limit allows for resource exhaustion and a denial of service (bsc#1281439).
• CVE-2026-91991: incomplete fix for cookie attribute injection allows for cookie validation bypass via semicolon- delimited data in capitalized parameters (bsc#1281440).

This update for python-tornado fixes the following issues:

• CVE-2023-54397: Tornado before 6.3.3 contains an HTTP request smuggling vulnerability due to improper parsing of Content-Length headers accepting non-standard characters. At (bsc#1280689).
• CVE-2024-58384: CRLF injection in CurlAsyncHTTPClient headers (bsc#1281059).
• CVE-2026-91990: splitting of multipart data before validation of the max_parts limit allows for resource exhaustion and a denial of service (bsc#1281439).
• CVE-2026-91991: incomplete fix for cookie attribute injection allows for cookie validation bypass via semicolon- delimited data in capitalized parameters (bsc#1281440).

It was discovered that Tornado did not properly handle certain HTTP requests and network inputs. An attacker could possibly use these issues to cause a denial of service, expose sensitive information, or bypass access controls.

(CVE-2023-54397, CVE-2024-14029, CVE-2026-91990, CVE-2026-91992, CVE-2026-103262, CVE-2026-103263)