CVE-2024-52804 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in tornado. A fix is available for tornado — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Tornado has HTTP cookie parsing DoS vulnerability
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-52804.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2024-52804 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,636 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
tornadoReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. The algorithm used for parsing HTTP cookies in Tornado versions prior to 6.4.2 sometimes has quadratic complexity, leading to excessive CPU consumption when parsing maliciously-crafted cookie headers. This parsing occurs in the event loop thread and may block the processing of other requests. Version 6.4.2 fixes the issue.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | tornado | all versions | 6.4.2pip install --upgrade 'tornado==6.4.2' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for tornado, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update tornado to 6.4.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-52804 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2024-52804 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2024-52804. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | pcs-0:0.10.18-2.el8_10.4 | RHSA-2025:2872 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Advanced Mission Critical Update Support | pcs-0:0.10.8-1.el8_4.6 | RHSA-2025:2955 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 Telecommunications Update Service | pcs-0:0.10.12-6.el8_6.7 | RHSA-2025:2956 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 Extended Update Support | pcs-0:0.10.15-4.el8_8.4 | RHSA-2025:3109 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | python-tornado-0:6.4.2-1.el9_5 | RHSA-2024:10590 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | pcs-0:0.11.8-1.el9_5.2 | RHSA-2025:2471 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Update Services for SAP Solutions | pcs-0:0.11.1-10.el9_0.7 | RHSA-2025:2550 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 Extended Update Support | python-tornado-0:6.4.2-1.el9_2 | RHSA-2024:10836 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-52804 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2024-52804 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.