CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2024-39317 — Wagtail is an open source content management system built on Django
Wagtail is an open source content management system built on Django. A bug in Wagtail's `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.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2024-07-11
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-1333
Affected products
- torchbox / wagtail
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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