CVE-2024-35228

Wagtail is an open source content management system built on Django. Due to an improperly applied permission check in the wagtail.contrib.settings module, a user with access to the Wagtail admin and knowledge of the URL of the edit view for a settings model can access and update that setting, even when they have not been granted permission over the model. The vulnerability is not exploitable by an ordinary site visitor without access to the Wagtail admin. Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 6.0.5 and 6.1.2. Wagtail releases prior to 6.0 are unaffected. Users are advised to upgrade. Site owners who are unable to upgrade to a patched version can avoid the vulnerability in ModelViewSet by registering the model as a snippet instead. No workaround is available for wagtail.contrib.settings.

Weakness

The product does not handle or incorrectly handles when it has insufficient privileges to access resources or functionality as specified by their permissions. This may cause it to follow unexpected code paths that may leave the product in an invalid state.

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

• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/commit/284f75a6f91f7ab18cc304d7d34f33b559ae37b1
• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/security/advisories/GHSA-xxfm-vmcf-g33f