CVE-2020-11037: Potential Observable Timing Discrepancy in Wagtail

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.)

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.