March 1, 2016
Django 1.6.11.3 fixes one security issue. It corresponds to the Django 1.8.10 and 1.9.3 releases.
Django relies on user input in some cases (e.g.
django.contrib.auth.views.login
and i18n
to redirect the user to an
“on success” URL. The security check for these redirects (namely
django.utils.http.is_safe_url()
) considered some URLs with basic
authentication credentials “safe” when they shouldn’t be.
For example, a URL like http://mysite.example.com\@attacker.com
would be
considered safe if the request’s host is http://mysite.example.com
, but
redirecting to this URL sends the user to attacker.com
.
Also, if a developer relies on is_safe_url()
to provide safe redirect
targets and puts such a URL into a link, they could suffer from an XSS attack.
In each major version of Django since 1.6, the default number of iterations
for the PBKDF2PasswordHasher
and its subclasses has increased. This
improves the security of the password as the speed of hardware increases,
however, it also creates a timing difference between a login request for a
user with a password encoded in an older number of iterations and login
request for a nonexistent user (which runs the default hasher’s default number
of iterations since Django 1.6).
This only affects users who haven’t logged in since the iterations were increased. The first time a user logs in after an iterations increase, their password is updated with the new iterations and there is no longer a timing difference.
The new BasePasswordHasher.harden_runtime()
method allows hashers to
bridge the runtime gap between the work factor (e.g. iterations) supplied in
existing encoded passwords and the default work factor of the hasher. This
method is implemented for PBKDF2PasswordHasher
and
BCryptPasswordHasher
. The number of rounds for the latter hasher hasn’t
changed since Django 1.4, but some projects may subclass it and increase the
work factor as needed.
A warning will be emitted for any third-party password hashers that don’t
implement a harden_runtime()
method.
If you have different password hashes in your database (such as SHA1 hashes from users who haven’t logged in since the default hasher switched to PBKDF2 in Django 1.4), the timing difference on a login request for these users may be even greater and this fix doesn’t remedy that difference (or any difference when changing hashers). You may be able to upgrade those hashes to prevent a timing attack for that case.
Jul 05, 2016