Wagtail is an open source content management system built on Django. A bug in Wagtails parse_query_string would result in it taking a long time to process suitably crafted inputs. When used to parse sufficiently long strings of characters without a space, parse_query_string would take an unexpectedly large amount of time to process, resulting in a denial of service. In an initial Wagtail installation, the vulnerability can be exploited by any Wagtail admin user. It cannot be exploited by end users. If your Wagtail site has a custom search implementation which uses parse_query_string, it may be exploitable by other users (e.g. unauthenticated users). Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 5.2.6, 6.0.6 and 6.1.3.
The product uses a regular expression with an inefficient, possibly exponential worst-case computational complexity that consumes excessive CPU cycles.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wagtail | Wagtail | 2.0 (including) | 5.2.6 (excluding) |
| Wagtail | Wagtail | 6.0 (including) | 6.0.6 (excluding) |
| Wagtail | Wagtail | 6.1 (including) | 6.1.3 (excluding) |
Attackers can create crafted inputs that
intentionally cause the regular expression to use
excessive backtracking in a way that causes the CPU
consumption to spike.