Wagtail 2.9.3 release notes¶

CVE-2020-15118: HTML injection through form field help text¶

This release addresses an HTML injection vulnerability through help text in the wagtail.contrib.forms form builder app. When a form page type is made available to Wagtail editors, and the page template is built using Django’s standard form rendering helpers such as form.as_p (as directed in the documentation), 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.

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.

Many thanks to Timothy Bautista for reporting this issue.