Issue 360: Python and Wagtail Security Releases
| in blog | Django News |
|---|---|
| published date | 2026-10-23 |
| original entry | Issue 360: Python and Wagtail Security Releases |
Expedited Python releases and Wagtail fixes across three branches after eMudhra's CA keys were cracked in milliseconds, plus the Steering Council's call for hands on Django 6.2.
News
Expedited security releases on October 21, carrying pip 26.2.2 and certifi 2026.10.19 to drop the compromised eMudhra CA. 3.13 is the odd one out: it had just entered security-only mode, where pip is not normally updated, so the team cut fresh installers anyway. 3.15.1 is also 3.15's first maintenance release, with roughly 330 fixes from 117 contributors.
The emSign root was pulled from CA bundles after eMudhra's intermediate keys turned out to be insecure, leaving older clients open to man-in-the-middle attacks against PyPI and python.org. Upgrade now: certifi 2026.10.19, pip 26.2.2, uv 0.13.4, sigstore 4.5.1, in every virtualenv and container image. pip is the one that matters most, since it always trusts its vendored bundle and distrusting the CA at the OS level will not help.
The technical story behind the advisory, and it is remarkable: each P-384 private key was 47 zero bytes followed by one non-zero byte, so Scott Helme recovered all eight in under a second on a laptop by trying 255 candidates. eMudhra blames a key ceremony script that generated a second weak keypair, picked up for the CSR because the names looked alike.
Wagtail CMS News
All three landed on October 20 with the same four fixes: an authorization bypass across collections via privacy settings, formula injection in XLSX exports, mishandled ancestor restrictions in the Pages admin API, and stored XSS through third-party HTML editors. 8.0.1 adds a fifth, access restrictions on the API v3 pages endpoint, plus a batch of API v3 write fixes. Also out: 7.4.4 and 7.0.10.
The release candidate adds Python 3.15 support and drops 3.10. API v3 gains write support for TypedTableBlock and nested inline relations, an ImageRenditionField, and workflow operations for pages and snippets. Redirects are now auto-created only when a live page moves or is renamed; set WAGTAILREDIRECTS_AUTO_CREATE = 'always' to get the old behavior back.
Django Software Foundation
Tim Schilling posts the Steering Council's list of what needs hands for 6.2: testing CompositeField, plus review on a DEFAULT_PK_FIELD setting, moving models between apps, partitioned cookies, and HTTP QUERY support. A second list covers ideas needing technical vetting, including a task timeout API and import maps.
This week's agenda: the quarterly outreach message, the Sovereign Tech Agency Resilience Fund, the VectorField DEP, Memcached clients, Jazzband updates, and suggestions for the new Triage and Review Team.
Updates to Django
Last week we had 15 pull requests merged into Django by 10 different contributors - including 3 first-time contributors! Congratulations to Sanskar Kharya, Aman Kumar Jain and Helmi Lakhder for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!
New in Django 6.2:
- Streaming responses now include configured CSP nonces in their headers, even when unused in the body. Inline scripts or styles that previously passed without a matching nonce may now be blocked or reported.
- A CSP directive whose only source is NONCE is emitted as
'none'when the nonce goes unused, instead of being dropped from the header. - Directories created during file uploads and by the file-based cache backend now combine the requested permissions mode with the process umask, matching
os.mkdir. A typical0o022umask turns0o775into0o755, and the set-group-ID bit is no longer guaranteed, so set it on the parent directory instead.FILE_UPLOAD_PERMISSIONSis unaffected. - The warning logged when a database error occurs while validating model constraints now escapes the message and trims it to 4096 characters.
- Python 3.15 compatibility is now documented.
New in Django 6.1:
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Django Fellow Reports
Chasing a forum thread led Jacob Tyler Walls to merge a fix that reduces the cost of building many-to-many related managers. He also spotted the last tweaks needed for multiline template tags, drafted a security fix, and triaged a JSONField RecursionError on deeply nested input.
Natalia Bidart kept the djangodocs Sphinx cleanup and the DEP 20 release checklists moving, including CVE records that can name the first affected release per branch. The Triage and Review Team held its first meeting, and the Security and Triage teams both gained members.
A short week around coughs and colds, but Sarah Boyce landed CSP nonces in headers for streaming responses, corrected verbatim-block tokenization, and enforced integer expiry times for file-based sessions. She also added Lilian Tran to the security team and Shai Berger as a triager.
Python Software Foundation
Aldo Caneo, Donghee Na, Paul Moore, and Takayuki Shimizukawa join the Fellow roster, recognized together for maintaining libraries, writing educational material, organizing events, and mentoring. Q4 nominations close November 20, 2026; email psf-fellow at python.org with the nominee's accomplishments.
PyPI blocked outlook.com and hotmail.com outright in June 2024 after a bulk malware campaign, which caught legitimate users too. A donated reputation service from UserCheck now judges addresses individually, so both domains are allowed again; in its first month it rejected 62 disposable domains and 120+ throwaway addresses.
The Python, PSF, and Jython wikis went read-only in February after AI scrapers overwhelmed hosts partly still running Python 2. They are back as static sites on GitHub Pages, edited by pull request against psf/wiki, with write access going first to the old wikis' known stewards.
Articles
Tim Schilling argues Django's feature process has quietly come together: new-feature ideas live in a GitHub repo where emoji reactions act as votes, proposals get asked to prove themselves as third-party packages first, and Django Probe plus Praful Gulani's experimental-features GSoC work could decide what lands on usage data instead of advocacy.
Hugo van Kemenade's eol command pulls endoflife.date into a color-coded table, so eol django shows release, support, and end-of-life dates at a glance (6.1, 6.0, and 5.2 supported, 6.0 security-only). uv tool install norwegianblue, and it speaks Markdown, reStructuredText, and JSON for docs and scripts.
Django's default CONN_MAX_AGE = 0 means every task a worker picks up opens its own Postgres connection, about 5ms, longer than claiming and running the task on a warm one. Set it to 600 or use a connection pool before you benchmark anything. The numbers come from django-ox's own vendor.
Stein Ove Helset replaces his SSH-and-run-the-commands routine with Deployer, a PHP tool that is happy to run manage.py: dep deploy builds a fresh release with its own virtualenv, runs checks, migrations, and collectstatic, then flips a current symlink and restarts Gunicorn. Shared .env and media survive between releases, and rolling back is one command.
Matthias Kestenholz splits the question by context: projects track the current stable release or a pre-release, while the more foundational a library is, the further back it should reach. He drops versions to prune CI cost or to use something new, and lands on Python 3.10+ with Django 3.2 or 4.2+ for most packages.
Events
Tuesday, November 24 at 7pm ET, hybrid from E-gineering in Indianapolis or over Zoom. Tim Schilling covers what's new in contributing to Django, and Calvin Hendryx-Parker argues batteries-included against speed in the Django/FastAPI debate. Register on Meetup for the in-person seat or the Zoom link.
Podcasts
Loes Crama is a software engineer at cosine Measurement Systems, contributing to ESA's NewAthena mission. We discuss her lifelong interest in space and how her work combines software engineering, data engineering, and data science.
Videos
Loes Crama is a software engineer at cosine Measurement Systems working on ESA's NewAthena mission, the subject of her DjangoCon Europe talk on how Django helps build the largest X-ray observatory yet. This Django Chat episode covers how she arrived at a job that combines software engineering, data engineering, and data science.
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