Bug 1221526 (CVE-2015-3982)

The following flaw was found in Django 1.8:

A change to session.flush() in the cached_db session backend in Django 1.8 mistakenly sets the session key to an empty string rather than None. An empty string is treated as a valid session key and the session cookie is set accordingly. Any users with an empty string in their session cookie will use the same session store. session.flush() is called by django.contrib.auth.logout() and, more seriously, by django.contrib.auth.login() when a user switches accounts. If a user is logged in and logs in again to a different account (without logging out) the session is flushed to avoid reuse. After the session is flushed (and its session key becomes '') the account details are set on the session and the session is saved. Any users with an empty string in their session cookie will now be logged into that account.

Acknowledgements:

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