CVE-2020-11037

MEDIUM6.1EPSS 0.05%

Potential Observable Timing Discrepancy in Wagtail

Published: 5/7/2020Modified: 3/13/2026

Description

### Impact 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](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-developers/iAaq0pvHXuA/fpUuwjK3i2wJ).) 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. ### Patches Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 2.7.3 (for the LTS 2.7 branch), Wagtail 2.8.2 and Wagtail 2.9. ### Workarounds Site owners who are unable to upgrade to the new versions can use [user- or group-based privacy restrictions](https://docs.wagtail.io/en/stable/advanced_topics/privacy.html) to restrict access to sensitive information; these are unaffected by this vulnerability.

Affected packages (2)

CVSS scores

SourceVersionSeverityVector
osvCVSS 4.0—CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:H/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:L/SA:N
osvCVSS 3.1MEDIUM6.1CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N

References (8)