🛡️ CVE-2024-39317 — wagtail

🟠 CVSS 8.0 — High ✅ No Known Exploit CWE-1333 OSV
8.0
CVSS Score
0 Low4 Medium7 High9 Critical10

Description

Wagtail regular expression denial-of-service via search query parsing

Impact

A bug in Wagtail's [parse_query_string](https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/topics/search/searching.html#wagtailsearch-query-string-parsing) would result in it taking a long time to process suitably crafted inputs. When used to parse sufficiently long strings of characters without a space, parse_query_string would take an unexpectedly large amount of time to process, resulting in a denial of service.

In an initial Wagtail installation, the vulnerability can be exploited by any Wagtail admin user. It cannot be exploited by end users. If your Wagtail site has a custom search implementation which uses parse_query_string, it may be exploitable by other users (e.g. unauthenticated users).

Patches

Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 5.2.6, 6.0.6 and 6.1.3.

This vulnerability affects all unpatched versions from Wagtail 2.0 onwards.

Workarounds

Site owners who are unable to upgrade to a patched version can limit the length of search terms passed to parse_query_string. Whilst the performance characteristics will depend on your hosting environment, 1000 characters has been shown to still be fairly fast, without triggering this vulnerability.

No workaround is available for the Wagtail admin usage.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to [Jake Howard](https://github.com/RealOrangeOne) for reporting this issue.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

  • Visit Wagtail's [support channels](https://docs.wagtail.io/en/stable/support.html)
  • Email us at [security@wagtail.org](mailto:[email protected]) (view our [security policy](https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/security/policy) for more information).

How this vulnerability can be exploited

This issue can be reached over the network, attack complexity is low, an attacker needs low-level privileges on the target. No user interaction is required. Rated impact: confidentiality none, integrity none, availability high.

Weakness class

CVE-2024-39317 is classified as CWE-1333: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity. A regular expression backtracks catastrophically on crafted input, consuming CPU out of proportion to input size.

Affected software

CVE-2024-39317 is recorded against 1 package.

  • wagtail (from 2.0 up to 5.2.6)

Timeline and source

Published on 11 July 2024 and last revised on 17 June 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. A vendor advisory or fix has been published. Record sourced from OSV.

References

github.com (Web)
nvd.nist.gov (Advisory)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Package)

Details

Severity HIGH
CVSS Score 8.0
CVSS Vector CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CWE CWE-1333
Public Exploit ✅ No
Source OSV
Published 2024-07-11
Updated 2026-08-12
Modified 2026-06-17

Affected Packages

Software From version Fixed in
wagtail 2.0 5.2.6

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