Tornado vulnerable to excessive logging caused by malformed multipart form data
Description
Published by the National Vulnerability Database
May 15, 2025
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database
May 16, 2025
Reviewed
May 16, 2025
Last updated
May 16, 2025
Summary
When Tornado's
multipart/form-data
parser encounters certain errors, it logs a warning but continues trying to parse the remainder of the data. This allows remote attackers to generate an extremely high volume of logs, constituting a DoS attack. This DoS is compounded by the fact that the logging subsystem is synchronous.Affected versions
All versions of Tornado prior to 6.5.0 are affected. The vulnerable parser is enabled by default.
Solution
Upgrade to Tornado version 6.5. In the meantime, risk can be mitigated by blocking
Content-Type: multipart/form-data
in a proxy.References