SCA: security update for wagtail (GHSA-2473-9hgq-j7xw)

high Tenable Cloud Security Plugin ID 408664

Description

There are packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability referenced in the following CVE:

- In Wagtail before versions 2.7.4 and 2.9.3, when a form page type is made available to Wagtail editors
through the `wagtail.contrib.forms` app, and the page template is built using Django's standard form
rendering helpers such as form.as_p, any HTML tags used within a form field's help text will be rendered
unescaped in the page. Allowing HTML within help text is an intentional design decision by Django;
however, as a matter of policy Wagtail does not allow editors to insert arbitrary HTML by default, as this
could potentially be used to carry out cross-site scripting attacks, including privilege escalation. This
functionality should therefore not have been made available to editor-level users. The vulnerability is
not exploitable by an ordinary site visitor without access to the Wagtail admin. Patched versions have
been released as Wagtail 2.7.4 (for the LTS 2.7 branch) and Wagtail 2.9.3 (for the current 2.9 branch). In
these versions, help text will be escaped to prevent the inclusion of HTML tags. Site owners who wish to
re-enable the use of HTML within help text (and are willing to accept the risk of this being exploited by
editors) may set WAGTAILFORMS_HELP_TEXT_ALLOW_HTML = True in their configuration settings. Site owners who
are unable to upgrade to the new versions can secure their form page templates by rendering forms field-
by-field as per Django's documentation, but omitting the |safe filter when outputting the help text.
(CVE-2020-15118)

See Also

https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-2473-9hgq-j7xw

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 408664

Version: Revision 1.6

Type: Local

Family: SCA Checks

Published: 1/23/2025

Updated: 7/2/2026

Supported Sensors: Tenable Cloud Security, Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 2.3

Percentile: 8.67

Vendor

Vendor Severity: High

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Low

Base Score: 3.5

Temporal Score: 2.6

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2020-15118

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.4

Temporal Score: 4.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

CVSS v4

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.2

Threat Score: 4.1

Threat Vector: CVSS:4.0/E:U

Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:H/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Vulnerability Information

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 7/20/2020

Vulnerability Publication Date: 7/20/2020

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2020-15118

cwe: CWE-79