CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-45809

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Oct 19, 2023 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
2.7
LOW
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Wagtail is an open source content management system built on Django. A user with a limited-permission editor account for the Wagtail admin can make a direct URL request to the admin view that handles bulk actions on user accounts. While authentication rules prevent the user from making any changes, the error message discloses the display names of user accounts, and by modifying URL parameters, the user can retrieve the display name for any user. The vulnerability is not exploitable by an ordinary site visitor without access to the Wagtail admin. Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 4.1.8 (LTS), 5.0.5 and 5.1.3. The fix is also included in Release Candidate 1 of the forthcoming Wagtail 5.2 release. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Wagtail Torchbox * 4.1.9 (excluding)
Wagtail Torchbox 4.2 (including) 5.0.5 (excluding)
Wagtail Torchbox 5.1 (including) 5.1.3 (excluding)

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References