CVE-2020-11037: Torchbox Wagtail

Medium severity, CVSS 4.7. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In Wagtail before versions 2.7.3 and 2.8.2, a potential timing attack exists on pages or documents that have been protected with a shared password through Wagtail's "Privacy" controls. This password check is performed through a character-by-character string comparison, and so an attacker who is able to measure the time taken by this check to a high degree of accuracy could potentially use timing differences to gain knowledge of the password. This is [understood to be feasible on a local network, but not on the public internet](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-developers/iAaq0pvHXuA/fpUuwjK3i2wJ). Privacy settings that restrict access to pages/documents on a per-user or per-group basis (as opposed to a shared password) are unaffected by this vulnerability. This has been patched in 2.7.3, 2.8.2, 2.9.

Affected products

• Torchbox Wagtail: from 2.7, before 2.7.3 (fixed in 2.7.3); from 2.8, before 2.8.2 (fixed in 2.8.2)

Published 2020-04-30. Last modified 2026-06-17.