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 /[email protected]/ 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).