GHSA-2473-9hgq-j7xw CVE-2020-15118 PYSEC-2020-154
Cross-Site Scripting in Wagtail
Medium
PyPI
- Severity
- 0.0 / 10
- Medium · CVSS 4.0
- Exploit chance (EPSS)
- 1.10%
- Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 65.71% of scored vulnerabilities.
- Known exploited
- No
- Not in CISA's catalog
- Weakness
- CWE-79 Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- Fix
2.9.3- Upgrade wagtail to this version or later
Description
Impact
When a form page type is made available to Wagtail editors through the wagtail.contrib.forms app, and the page template is built using Django's standard form rendering helpers such as form.as_p (as directed in the documentation), any HTML tags used within a form field's help text will be rendered unescaped in the page. Allowing HTML within help text is an intentional design decision by Django; however, as a matter of policy Wagtail does not allow editors to insert arbitrary HTML by default, as this could potentially be used to carry out cross-site scripting attacks, including privilege escalation. This functionality should therefore not have been made available to editor-level users.
The vulnerability is not exploitable by an ordinary site visitor without access to the Wagtail admin.
Patches
Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 2.7.4 (for the LTS 2.7 branch) and Wagtail 2.9.3 (for the current 2.9 branch). In these versions, help text will be escaped to prevent the inclusion of HTML tags. Site owners who wish to re-enable the use of HTML within help text (and are willing to accept the risk of this being exploited by editors) may set WAGTAILFORMS_HELP_TEXT_ALLOW_HTML = True in their configuration settings.
Workarounds
Site owners who are unable to upgrade to the new versions can secure their form page templates by rendering forms field-by-field as per Django's documentation, but omitting the |safe filter when outputting the help text.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Timothy Bautista for reporting this issue.
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
- Visit Wagtail's support channels
- Email us at security@wagtail.io (if you wish to send encrypted email, the public key ID is
0x6ba1e1a86e0f8ce8)
Affected versions
PyPI
| Package | Vulnerable | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| wagtail | >= 2.8rc1, < 2.9.3 |
2.9.3 |
| wagtail | < 2.7.4 |
2.7.4 |
| wagtail | >= 2.7, < 2.7.4>= 2.9, < 2.9.3 |
2.7.42.9.3 |
How to fix
Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.
wagtail PyPI → 2.9.3
- pip
pip install --upgrade "wagtail>=2.9.3"- poetry
poetry add "wagtail>=2.9.3"- uv
uv add "wagtail>=2.9.3"
Severity breakdown
CVSS 4.0 0.0
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:H/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Attack requirements
- Present
- Privileges required
- High
- User interaction
- Passive
- Confidentiality (vulnerable system)
- High
- Integrity (vulnerable system)
- High
- Availability (vulnerable system)
- None
- Confidentiality (subsequent systems)
- None
- Integrity (subsequent systems)
- None
- Availability (subsequent systems)
- None
CVSS 3.1 5.7
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- High
- Privileges required
- High
- User interaction
- Required
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- High
- Integrity
- High
- Availability
- None
Weakness
CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
The product does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes user-controllable input before it is placed in output that is used as a web page that is served to other users.
How to prevent it
- Architecture and Design: Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid [REF-1482]. Examples of libraries and frameworks that make it easier to generate properly encoded output include Microsoft's Anti-XSS library, the OWASP ESAPI Encoding module, and Apache Wicket.
- Implementation, Architecture and Design: Understand the context in which your data will be used and the encoding that will be expected. This is especially important when transmitting data between different components, or when generating outputs that can contain multiple encodings at the same time, such as web pages or multi-part mail messages. Study all expected communication protocols and data representations to determine the required encoding strategies. For any data that will be output to another web page, especially any data that was received from external inputs, use the appropriate encoding on all non-alphanumeric characters. Parts of the same output document may require different encodings, which will vary depending on whether the output is in the: HTML body Element attributes (such as src="XYZ") URIs JavaScript sections Cascading Style Sheets and style property etc. Note that HTML Entity Encoding is only appropriate for the HTML body. Consult the XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet [REF-724] for more details on the types of encoding and escaping that are needed.
- Architecture and Design, Implementation: Understand all the potential areas where untrusted inputs can enter your software: parameters or arguments, cookies, anything read from the network, environment variables, reverse DNS lookups, query results, request headers, URL components, e-mail, files, filenames, databases, and any external systems that provide data to the application. Remember that such inputs may be obtained indirectly through API calls.
- Architecture and Design: For any security checks that are performed on the client side, ensure that these checks are duplicated on the server side, in order to avoid CWE-602. Attackers can bypass the client-side checks by modifying values after the checks have been performed, or by changing the client to remove the client-side checks entirely. Then, these modified values would be submitted to the server.
- Architecture and Design: If available, use structured mechanisms that automatically enforce the separation between data and code. These mechanisms may be able to provide the relevant quoting, encoding, and validation automatically, instead of relying on the developer to provide this capability at every point where output is generated.
- Implementation: Use and specify an output encoding that can be handled by the downstream component that is reading the output. Common encodings include ISO-8859-1, UTF-7, and UTF-8. When an encoding is not specified, a downstream component may choose a different encoding, either by assuming a default encoding or automatically inferring which encoding is being used, which can be erroneous. When the encodings are inconsistent, the downstream component might treat some character or byte sequences as special, even if they are not special in the original encoding. Attackers might then be able to exploit this discrepancy and conduct injection attacks; they even might be able to bypass protection mechanisms that assume the original encoding is also being used by the downstream component. The problem of inconsistent output encodings often arises in web pages. If an encoding is not specified in an HTTP header, web browsers often guess about which encoding is being used. This can open up the browser to subtle XSS attacks.
- Implementation: With Struts, write all data from form beans with the bean's filter attribute set to true.
- Implementation: To help mitigate XSS attacks against the user's session cookie, set the session cookie to be HttpOnly. In browsers that support the HttpOnly feature (such as more recent versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox), this attribute can prevent the user's session cookie from being accessible to malicious client-side scripts that use document.cookie. This is not a complete solution, since HttpOnly is not supported by all browsers. More importantly, XmlHttpRequest and other powerful browser technologies provide read access to HTTP headers, including the Set-Cookie header in which the HttpOnly flag is set.
- Implementation: Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does. When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue." Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright. When dynamically constructing web pages, use stringent allowlists that limit the character set based on the expected value of the parameter in the request. All input should be validated and cleansed, not just parameters that the user is supposed to specify, but all data in the request, including hidden fields, cookies, headers, the URL itself, and so forth. A common mistake that leads to continuing XSS vulnerabilities is to validate only fields that are expected to be redisplayed by the site. It is common to see data from the request that is reflected by the application server or the application that the development team did not anticipate. Also, a field that is not currently reflected may be used by a future developer. Therefore, validating ALL parts of the HTTP request is recommended. Note that proper output encoding, escaping, and quoting is the most ef
- Architecture and Design: When the set of acceptable objects, such as filenames or URLs, is limited or known, create a mapping from a set of fixed input values (such as numeric IDs) to the actual filenames or URLs, and reject all other inputs.
- Operation: Use an application firewall that can detect attacks against this weakness. It can be beneficial in cases in which the code cannot be fixed (because it is controlled by a third party), as an emergency prevention measure while more comprehensive software assurance measures are applied, or to provide defense in depth [REF-1481].
- Operation, Implementation: When using PHP, configure the application so that it does not use register_globals. During implementation, develop the application so that it does not rely on this feature, but be wary of implementing a register_globals emulation that is subject to weaknesses such as CWE-95, CWE-621, and similar issues.
References
Advisories
Packages
Other links
- github.com/wagtail/wagtail/security/advisories/GHSA-2473-9hgq-j7xw
- github.com/wagtail/wagtail/commit/d9a41e7f24d08c024acc9a3094940199df94db34
- docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/models/fields
- docs.wagtail.io/en/stable/reference/contrib/forms/index.html
- github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/wagtail/PYSEC-2020-154.yaml
- github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/master/docs/releases/2.9.3.rst
Timeline
- Published
- Last updated by the source
- Latest EPSS score
Related advisories
| Advisory | Severity | Why it's related |
|---|---|---|
| GHSA-jm5p-837g-rv8g Wagtail: Improper restriction handling on Page translation API endpoint | Medium | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-x5cx-w6p2-mxf2 Wagtail: Improper permission handling when copying snippets | Medium | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-c2xx-cjmh-9q8f Wagtail: Improper restriction handling on descendant collections in Documents and Images API | Medium | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-92hv-j533-69wc Wagtail: Identification of documents by SHA1 hash | Low | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-3vrh-m9w7-v94f Wagtail: Improper restriction handling on Pages admin API | Medium | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-23m2-mghx-vqmf Wagtail: Reflected XSS in dynamic image URL generator view | High | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-8634-mr4j-r72c Wagtail: Pages translations can be created without page permissions when using simple_translation | Medium | Also affects wagtail |
| GHSA-r6p4-grq7-xm4m Wagtail: Improper permission handling in image preview | Medium | Also affects wagtail |
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