What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-7536

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 4.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-03-09 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-185

Description

An issue was discovered in Django 2.0 before 2.0.3, 1.11 before 1.11.11, and 1.8 before 1.8.19. The django.utils.html.urlize() function was extremely slow to evaluate certain inputs due to catastrophic backtracking vulnerabilities in two regular expressions (only one regular expression for Django 1.8.x). The urlize() function is used to implement the urlize and urlizetrunc template filters, which were thus vulnerable.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04, 17.10
• Debian Linux: 7.0, 8.0, 9.0
• Django: from 1.8 before 1.8.19; from 1.11 before 1.11.11; from 2.0 before 2.0.3 — fixed in 1.11.11, 1.8.19, 2.0.3
• OpenStack: 10, 13

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Django 1.11.11, 1.8.19, 2.0.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/103361
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:2927
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:0051
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:0082
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:0265
• https://github.com/django/django/commit/1ca63a66ef3163149ad822701273e8a1844192c2
• https://github.com/django/django/commit/abf89d729f210c692a50e0ad3f75fb6bec6fae16
• https://github.com/django/django/commit/e157315da3ae7005fa0683ffc9751dbeca7306c8
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/03/msg00006.html
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3591-1/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4161
• https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2018/mar/06/security-releases/

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