Bug 1179672 (CVE-2015-0219)

The Django project reports the following issue:

"""
When HTTP headers are placed into the WSGI environ, they are normalized by converting to uppercase, converting all dashes to underscores, and prepending `HTTP_`. For instance, a header ``X-Auth-User`` would become ``HTTP_X_AUTH_USER`` in the WSGI environ (and thus also in Django's ``request.META`` dictionary).

Unfortunately, this means that the WSGI environ cannot distinguish between headers containing dashes and headers containing underscores: ``X-Auth-User`` and ``X-Auth_User`` both become ``HTTP_X_AUTH_USER``. This means that if a header is used in a security-sensitive way (for instance, passing authentication information along from a front-end proxy), even if the proxy carefully strips any incoming value for ``X-Auth-User``, an attacker may be able to provide an ``X-Auth_User`` header (with underscore) and bypass this protection.

In order to prevent such attacks, both Nginx and Apache 2.4+ strip all headers containing underscores from incoming requests by default. Django's built-in development server now does the same. Django's development server is not recommended for production use, but matching the behavior of common production servers reduces the surface area for behavior changes during deployment.
"""

This issue is resolved in the upstream versions 1.7.3, 1.6.10, and 1.4.18. Note that Django 1.5 is no longer receiving security updates.

Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank the upstream Django project for reporting this issue.