CVE-2025-67726
tornado: Tornado Quadratic DoS via Crafted Multipart Parameters
Severity
ModerateRed Hat Product Security
CVSS 3.1
Review impact separately from score.
Published · December 12, 2025
Updated · October 9, 2026
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.
Statement
The availability impact of this flaw is partially mitigated on Red Hat products as the host systems are not at risk.
CVSS score applicability
The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.
Mitigation
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.
CVSS / CWE
CVSS 3.1 · 5.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CWE-1333 · Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity