GHSA-mpf4-983q-p7j4

Summary

Tornado parses application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies with urllib.parse.parse_qs and does not pass max_num_fields. A body made almost entirely of separators produces tens of millions of fields, and the parse happens on the event loop before the handler runs, so a single request stalls the whole server.

Where it is

tornado/escape.py, at HEAD e530031405e2154654dedc4c84d5656b557ea310:

result = urllib.parse.parse_qs(
    qs, keep_blank_values, strict_parsing, encoding="latin1", errors="strict"
)

max_num_fields is the parameter CPython added for exactly this, and it is absent.

The path to it is entirely server-side and pre-dispatch. RequestHandler._execute parses the body at tornado/web.py:1821, which reaches HTTPServerRequest._parse_body at tornado/httputil.py:636, and the urlencoded branch of parse_body_arguments calls parse_qs_bytes at tornado/httputil.py:1030.

The size that reaches it is bounded only by the body cap, which defaults to the stream's max_buffer_size of 104857600 at tornado/iostream.py:239, applied as the request body default at tornado/http1connection.py:136-140. A 100 MB body of separators is around fifty million fields.

Impact

Denial of service against the whole process, not one request. Tornado is single-threaded and the parse is synchronous on the event loop, so every other connection waits. No authentication is needed if any route accepts a form post, which is the normal case.

Suggested fix

Pass a bound:

result = urllib.parse.parse_qs(
    qs, keep_blank_values, strict_parsing, encoding="latin1", errors="strict",
    max_num_fields=max_num_fields,
)

with a conservative default and a way for applications to raise it. CPython raises ValueError when the limit is exceeded, which maps cleanly onto a 400.

Lowering the default body cap for urlencoded specifically would help too, since 100 MB of form fields is not a shape any real client sends.

Why I do not think this is a duplicate

The published tornado advisories cover out-of-bounds access in the C extension, unbounded accumulation of decompressed chunks in AsyncHTTPClient, the Authorization header surviving cross-origin redirects, credential leakage on curl handle reuse, and cookie attribute validation. The decompression one is the nearest in spirit and is on the client side; this is the server parsing a request body. The call is unchanged at HEAD.