CVE-2024-35228 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.5) CWE-280 vulnerability in wagtail. A fix is available for wagtail — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Improper Handling of Insufficient Permissions in Wagtail
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-35228.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2024-35228 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,238 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
wagtail🐍wagtailReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Wagtail is an open source content management system built on Django. Due to an improperly applied permission check in the wagtail.contrib.settings module, a user with access to the Wagtail admin and knowledge of the URL of the edit view for a settings model can access and update that setting, even when they have not been granted permission over the model. The vulnerability is not exploitable by an ordinary site visitor without access to the Wagtail admin. Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 6.0.5 and 6.1.2. Wagtail releases prior to 6.0 are unaffected. Users are advised to upgrade. Site owners who are unable to upgrade to a patched version can avoid the vulnerability in ModelViewSet by registering the model as a snippet instead. No workaround is available for wagtail.contrib.settings.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | wagtail | ≥ 6.0.0&&< 6.0.5 | 6.0.5pip install --upgrade 'wagtail==6.0.5' |
| 🐍PyPI | wagtail | ≥ 6.1.0&&< 6.1.2 | 6.1.2pip install --upgrade 'wagtail==6.1.2' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for wagtail, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update wagtail to 6.0.5 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-35228 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2024-35228 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2024-35228. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-35228 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2024-35228 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.