GHSA-r4j5-9xpp-3985
Tornado: Event loop blocking and excess memory use from chunked bodies with many small chunks
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
When Tornado reads an HTTP/1.1 body that uses chunked transfer encoding, it processes all chunks that have already arrived without yielding to the event loop. A client can send a body made of millions of 1-byte chunks, which blocks the event loop (and therefore every other connection served by that process) for the entire time it takes to parse the body. A body near the default `max_body_size` of 100 MB can block the process for close to a minute, and the attacker can repeat or parallelize these requests.
Bodies made of tiny chunks also consumed far more memory than their size: a handler that does not use `@stream_request_body` stored each chunk as a separate object, using roughly 20 times as much memory as the bytes received.
### Impact
All Tornado HTTP servers are affected when they receive a request body for a handler that reads it, which includes any handler that does not reject the request before the body is read. No authentication is required. Lowering `max_body_size` reduces the maximum blocking time and memory use for each request but does not remove the issue.
`SimpleAsyncHTTPClient` is affected in the same way when it reads a response from a malicious server.
### Patches
Fixed in Tornado 6.6. Tornado now yields to the event loop periodically while reading any body, combines small chunks before passing them to `data_received`, and stores non-streaming bodies more compactly.
Applications using `@stream_request_body` should note that the pieces passed to `data_received` no longer correspond to HTTP chunk boundaries.
### Workarounds
- Run Tornado behind a reverse proxy that buffers request bodies and forwards them with a `Content-Length` header instead of chunked encoding.
- Lower `max_body_size` (for the whole server or for individual handlers) to limit the impact of each request.
### Credit
Reported by [uttej-badwane](https://github.com/uttej-badwane).
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.
- https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/security/advisories/GHSA-r4j5-9xpp-3985
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-115927
- https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/pull/3773
- https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/commit/ceab33581489751a66fba8566ad6d5960d4b01c8
- https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado
- https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/releases/tag/v6.6.0