DjangoCon Europe 2023

A Beginners Guide to Security Exploits in Action
2023-05-29 , Music Hall

It’s one thing to read the Django security page and follow the recommendations. It’s something completely different to actually understand why those recommendations exist.


Video: https://youtu.be/CN6zJlqdxt0

The talk will cover 5 different security vulnerabilities (spending ~5 mins on each) that are baked into a fake MySpace clone:

  • HTML serialization: Why supporting custom HTML is cool, but also dangerous
  • The penalties of using a guessable SECRET_KEY: How one might use it to abuse sessions
  • The downfalls of stepping outside the ORM: How write a more complex query and accidentally make it vulnerable to SQL injection
  • Consider setting ALLOWED_HOSTS: Injecting custom hosts in password reset emails
  • No really, consider setting ALLOWED_HOSTS: Unsafe open redirects and the importance of url_has_allowed_host_and_scheme

Each step will introduce in detail how to exploit the vulnerability, followed by patching and validation.

Ashley has spent 10 years as a software engineer, alternating between the Django and Rails environments. Most recently, she's been working on making infrastructure accessible to everyone at Aptible.

Mario has spent the last decade solving high-availability issues in places like Plex and GitLab, and most recently has been working on making infrastructure accessible to everyone at Aptible.