Description

A denial of service flaw has been discovered in the Tornado networking library. Affected versions of Tornado us 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.

Mitigation

Aliases