What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-14232

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-08-02 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

An issue was discovered in Django 1.11.x before 1.11.23, 2.1.x before 2.1.11, and 2.2.x before 2.2.4. 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

• Django: from 1.11 before 1.11.23; from 2.1 before 2.1.11; from 2.2 before 2.2.4 — fixed in 1.11.23, 2.1.11, 2.2.4
• openSUSE Leap: 15.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Django 1.11.23, 2.1.11, 2.2.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-08/msg00006.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-08/msg00025.html
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/10/04/6
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/04/1
• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/security/
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/django-announce/jIoju2-KLDs
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/STVX7X7IDWAH5SKE6MBMY3TEI6ZODBTK/
• https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Aug/15
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202004-17
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190828-0002/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2019/dsa-4498
• https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2019/aug/01/security-releases/

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