Launch Week Day 1: Announcing Security Design Review
LOW 3.7 PyPI

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

GHSA-cx3h-4qpv-8hc9 · CVE-2026-49854

Published · Modified

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).

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