GHSA-cx3h-4qpv-8hc9LowCVSS 3.7

Tornado has out-of-bounds memory access via C extension

Published
June 12, 2026
Last Modified
June 12, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

Summary

Tornado'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.

Mitigations

This 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).

🎯 Affected products1

  • pip/tornado:< 6.5.6

🔗 References (3)