CVE-2015-5963 Django denial of service via empty session record creation

What is CVE-2015-5963?

CVE-2015-5963 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 24 Aug 2015. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware in Django 1.8.x before 1.8.4, 1.7.x before 1.7.10, 1.4.x before 1.4.22, and possibly other versions allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (session store consumption or session record removal) via a large number of requests to contrib.auth.views.logout, which triggers the creation of an empty session record.

Weakness: CWE-399

Which versions are affected by CVE-2015-5963?

7 open source packages ship an affected version, including django and Django. It affects 3 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Djangoproject Django, Oracle Solaris.

How do I fix CVE-2015-5963?

Upgrade django to a fixed version for your release line: 1.4.22, 1.7.10 or 1.8.4.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2015-5963 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2015-5963 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2015-5963, GHSA-pgxh-wfw4-jx2v, PYSEC-2015-22, RHSA-2015:1876, UBUNTU-CVE-2015-5963.