March 18, 2015
Django 1.6.11 fixes two security issues in 1.6.10.
strip_tags()¶Last year strip_tags() was changed to work
iteratively. The problem is that the size of the input it’s processing can
increase on each iteration which results in an infinite loop in
strip_tags(). This issue only affects versions of Python that haven’t
received a bugfix in HTMLParser; namely Python < 2.7.7 and
3.3.5. Some operating system vendors have also backported the fix for the
Python bug into their packages of earlier versions.
To remedy this issue, strip_tags() will now return the original input if
it detects the length of the string it’s processing increases. Remember that
absolutely NO guarantee is provided about the results of strip_tags() being
HTML safe. So NEVER mark safe the result of a strip_tags() call without
escaping it first, for example with escape().
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 checks for these
redirects (namely django.utils.http.is_safe_url()) accepted URLs with
leading control characters and so considered URLs like \x08javascript:...
safe. This issue doesn’t affect Django currently, since we only put this URL
into the Location response header and browsers seem to ignore JavaScript
there. Browsers we tested also treat URLs prefixed with control characters such
as %08//example.com as relative paths so redirection to an unsafe target
isn’t a problem either.
However, 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 as some browsers such as Google Chrome ignore control
characters at the start of a URL in an anchor href.
Jul 27, 2022