FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

py-django -- denial of service vulnerability

Affected packages
py23-django < 0.96.1
py24-django < 0.96.1
py25-django < 0.96.1
py23-django-devel < 20071026
py24-django-devel < 20071026
py25-django-devel < 20071026

Details

VuXML ID d2c2952d-85a1-11dc-bfff-003048705d5a
Discovery 2007-10-26
Entry 2007-10-27

Django project reports:

A per-process cache used by Django's internationalization ("i18n") system to store the results of translation lookups for particular values of the HTTP Accept-Language header used the full value of that header as a key. An attacker could take advantage of this by sending repeated requests with extremely large strings in the Accept-Language header, potentially causing a denial of service by filling available memory.

Due to limitations imposed by Web server software on the size of HTTP header fields, combined with reasonable limits on the number of requests which may be handled by a single server process over its lifetime, this vulnerability may be difficult to exploit. Additionally, it is only present when the "USE_I18N" setting in Django is "True" and the i18n middleware component is enabled*. Nonetheless, all users of affected versions of Django are encouraged to update.

References

URL http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2007/oct/26/security-fix/