Know every vulnerabilitybefore it knows you.
DevGuard continuously monitors your dependencies and alerts you when CVEs like this one affect your stack — with real-time threat intelligence built for developers.
GHSA-2473-9hgq-j7xw
No affected components available
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)
The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is difficult for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability and may require special conditions. An attacker needs high-level or administrative privileges. The attacker needs the user to perform some action, like clicking a link. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the confidentiality of the information. There is a high impact on the integrity of the data.
Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.
The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
Browse More
Continuously monitor your dependencies and get alerted when vulnerabilities like this one affect your stack.
Checkout DevGuard