Django 1.4.8 release notes

September 14, 2013

Django 1.4.8 fixes two security issues present in previous Django releases in the 1.4 series.

Denial-of-service via password hashers

In previous versions of Django, no limit was imposed on the plaintext length of a password. This allowed a denial-of-service attack through submission of bogus but extremely large passwords, tying up server resources performing the (expensive, and increasingly expensive with the length of the password) calculation of the corresponding hash.

As of 1.4.8, Django’s authentication framework imposes a 4096-byte limit on passwords and will fail authentication with any submitted password of greater length.

Corrected usage of sensitive_post_parameters() in django.contrib.auth’s admin

The decoration of the add_view and user_change_password user admin views with sensitive_post_parameters() did not include method_decorator() (required since the views are methods) resulting in the decorator not being properly applied. This usage has been fixed and sensitive_post_parameters() will now throw an exception if it’s improperly used.