November 1, 2016
Django 1.8.16 fixes two security issues in 1.8.15.
When running tests with an Oracle database, Django creates a temporary database
user. In older versions, if a password isn’t manually specified in the database
settings TEST dictionary, a hardcoded password is used. This could allow
an attacker with network access to the database server to connect.
This user is usually dropped after the test suite completes, but not when using
the manage.py test --keepdb option or if the user has an active session
(such as an attacker’s connection).
A randomly generated password is now used for each test run.
DEBUG=True¶Older versions of Django don’t validate the Host header against
settings.ALLOWED_HOSTS when settings.DEBUG=True. This makes them
vulnerable to a DNS rebinding attack.
While Django doesn’t ship a module that allows remote code execution, this is
at least a cross-site scripting vector, which could be quite serious if
developers load a copy of the production database in development or connect to
some production services for which there’s no development instance, for
example. If a project uses a package like the django-debug-toolbar, then
the attacker could execute arbitrary SQL, which could be especially bad if the
developers connect to the database with a superuser account.
settings.ALLOWED_HOSTS is now validated regardless of DEBUG. For
convenience, if ALLOWED_HOSTS is empty and DEBUG=True, the following
variations of localhost are allowed ['localhost', '127.0.0.1', '::1']. If
your local settings file has your production ALLOWED_HOSTS value, you must
now omit it to get those fallback values.
Nov 02, 2020