CVE-2026-116578 — Vulnerability intelligence
— tornado
Published:
- CVSS
- 0
- CISA KEV
- Not listed; not proof of no exploitation
Original source text (not a translation)
Tornado: Open redirect in RedirectHandler via protocol-relative URLs
### Summary
`tornado.web.RedirectHandler` builds its target URL by substituting parts of the request path into a template. Depending on where those substitutions appear in the template, an attacker can craft a request that redirects to a host of their choosing. This creates an open redirect on the application's domain, which can be used in phishing.
### Impact
Applications are affected if they use `RedirectHandler` with a URL template where a regex capture group can influence the scheme or host of the redirect. This includes:
- **A substitution at the start of the path**, for example `(r"/(.*)/target", RedirectHandler, {"url": "/{0}/destination"})`. A request to `https://example.com//evil.com/target` redirects to `//evil.com/destination`, a protocol-relative URL pointing to evil.com. Variants using backslashes or encoded characters have the same effect, because browsers treat them as equivalent to `//`.
- **A substitution directly after the host**, for example `(r"/old(.*)", RedirectHandler, {"url": "https://new.example.com{0}"})`. A request to `/old.evil.com/` or `/old@evil.com/` redirects to evil.com.
- **A template that begins with a substitution** (such as `"{0}"`), which can be given an absolute URL.
Applications are not affected if their `RedirectHandler` templates use only static URLs, or if every substitution comes after a fixed host and a `/` (for example `"/static/{0}"` or `"https://example.com/{0}"`). Other uses of `RequestHandler.redirect()` are not affected by this advisory, although applications that pass user-controlled input to `redirect()` should validate it themselves.
### Patches
Fixed in Tornado 6.6. `RedirectHandler` now returns a 400 error if the substituted values would change the scheme or host of the redirect from what the template specifies. As a result, substitutions can no longer be used in the scheme or host part of a template. The similar check in `StaticFileHandler` has also been hardened against backslash and whitespace variants.
### Workarounds
- Change `RedirectHandler` templates so every substitution comes after a fixed prefix ending in `/`, or write capture-group regexes that cannot match characters such as `/`, `\`, `@`, `.` or `:` where they could affect the host.
- Alternatively, replace `RedirectHandler` with a custom handler that validates the target before calling `self.redirect()`.
### Credit
Reported by Longwei Wang (@gn00295120).