What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2018-7537
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.0)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 4.4% 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. If django.utils.text.Truncator's chars() and words() methods were passed the html=True argument, they were extremely slow to evaluate certain inputs due to a catastrophic backtracking vulnerability in a regular expression. The chars() and words() methods are used to implement the truncatechars_html and truncatewords_html 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
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/103357
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:2927
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:0265
- 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/
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/103357
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:2927
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:0265
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/03/msg00006.html
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3591-1/
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