CVE-2025-67726VulnerabilityPublished 12 Dec 2025Updated 18 Dec 2025

CVE-2025-67726: tornadoweb tornado · Excessive Iteration

Affects tornadoweb tornadoSource CVE Database V5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 7.5 High : upgrade to 6.5.3 soon.

Data as of 25 Oct 2026, 19:02 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score

7.5High

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 44% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch: Available – fixed in 6.5.3

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Attack Vector: Network
Attack Complexity: Low
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Scope: Unchanged
Confidentiality: None
Integrity: None
Availability: High

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Network: The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed, up to and including the entire Internet. Such a vulnerability is often termed 'remotely exploitable' and can be thought of as an attack being exploitable at the protocol level one or more network hops away (e.g., across one or more routers).
Attack Complexity: Low: Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required: None: The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.
User Interaction: None: The vulnerable system can be exploited without any interaction from any user.
Scope: Unchanged: An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are either the same, or both are managed by the same security authority.
Confidentiality: None: There is no loss of confidentiality within the impacted component.
Integrity: None: There is no loss of integrity within the impacted component.
Availability: High: There is total loss of availability, resulting in the attacker being able to fully deny access to resources in the impacted component; this loss is either sustained (while the attacker continues to deliver the attack) or persistent (the condition persists even after the attack has completed). Alternatively, the attacker has the ability to deny some availability, but the loss of availability presents a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component (e.g., the attacker cannot disrupt existing connections, but can prevent new connections; the attacker can repeatedly exploit a vulnerability that, in each instance of a successful attack, leaks a only small amount of memory, but after repeated exploitation causes a service to become completely unavailable).

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v3.1 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 12 Dec 2025
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 2026-10-25.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponised: Public exploit code exists in Metasploit or Exploit-DB, or CISA SSVC reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

Upgrade tornadoweb tornado to 6.5.3.

Affected software

Product	Affected	Fixed in
PyPItornado`pkg:pypi/tornado`Other threats	Affected <6.5.3	Fixed in 6.5.3

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

European organizations should immediately upgrade all Tornado deployments to version 6.5.3 or later to apply the fix for this vulnerability. Where immediate upgrading is not feasible, implement web application firewalls (WAFs) or reverse proxies with rules to detect and block HTTP requests containing unusually large or suspicious Content-Disposition headers with excessive parameters or quoted semicolons. Rate limiting and request size restrictions can reduce the risk of exploitation. Monitoring server CPU usage and request patterns can help detect potential exploitation attempts early. Additionally, consider isolating Tornado services behind load balancers or service meshes that can absorb or filter malicious traffic. Developers should review any custom parsing logic for similar inefficiencies and apply best practices for input validation and parsing optimization. Regular vulnerability scanning and patch management processes must be enforced to prevent exploitation of this and similar vulnerabilities.

Description

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Versions 6.5.2 and below use 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. This issue is fixed in version 6.5.3.

Impact

For European organizations using Tornado versions prior to 6.5.3, this vulnerability poses a significant risk of service disruption through denial-of-service attacks. Since Tornado is widely used in web applications and asynchronous services, especially in sectors like finance, healthcare, and public services, an attacker could remotely cause server unresponsiveness, leading to downtime, degraded user experience, and potential loss of business continuity. The single-threaded event loop architecture exacerbates the impact, as one malicious request can halt all processing. While confidentiality and integrity are not directly affected, the availability impact can indirectly affect trust and operational reliability. Organizations relying on Tornado-based services exposed to the internet are particularly vulnerable. The absence of known exploits suggests a window for proactive mitigation before active exploitation emerges.

CWE-834Excessive Iteration (opens in a new tab)
Class weakness
The product performs an iteration or loop without sufficiently limiting the number of times that the loop is executed.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.
CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (opens in a new tab)
Class weaknessLikelihood of exploit: High
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.
Architecture and Design
Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place.
Architecture and Design
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or; uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Architecture and Design
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
File Upload (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V12.1.1 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
XML Ping of the Death (opens in a new tab)
Regular Expression Exponential Blowup (opens in a new tab)
Sustained Client Engagement (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).

References

Community reviews

Loading reviews…

Exploitation evidence

What to do

Affected software

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 19 Dec 2025, 07:49 UTC

WeaknessesCWE-834, CWE-400

Technical details

References

Community reviews

Related threats