Timing Attack Vulnerability in Wagtail's Privacy Controls

CVE-2020-11037 · MEDIUM Severity

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

In Wagtail before versions 2.7.2 and 2.8.2, a potential timing attack exists on pages or documents that have been protected with a shared password through Wagtail's "Privacy" controls. This password check is performed through a character-by-character string comparison, and so an attacker who is able to measure the time taken by this check to a high degree of accuracy could potentially use timing differences to gain knowledge of the password. This is understood to be feasible on a local network, but not on the public internet. Privacy settings that restrict access to pages/documents on a per-user or per-group basis (as opposed to a shared password) are unaffected by this vulnerability. This has been patched in 2.7.3, 2.8.2, 2.9.

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