Fixed #14445 - Use HMAC and constant-time comparison functions where needed.

All adhoc MAC applications have been updated to use HMAC, using SHA1 to
generate unique keys for each application based on the SECRET_KEY, which is
common practice for this situation. In all cases, backwards compatibility
with existing hashes has been maintained, aiming to phase this out as per
the normal deprecation process. In this way, under most normal
circumstances the old hashes will have expired (e.g. by session expiration
etc.) before they become invalid.

In the case of the messages framework and the cookie backend, which was
already using HMAC, there is the possibility of a backwards incompatibility
if the SECRET_KEY is shorter than the default 50 bytes, but the low
likelihood and low impact meant compatibility code was not worth it.

All known instances where tokens/hashes were compared using simple string
equality, which could potentially open timing based attacks, have also been
fixed using a constant-time comparison function.

There are no known practical attacks against the existing implementations,
so these security improvements will not be backported.

git-svn-id: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk@14218 bcc190cf-cafb-0310-a4f2-bffc1f526a37

2 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/docs/internals/deprecation.txt b/docs/internals/deprecation.txt
index f4ebadd6f4..c227f9ab5c 100644
--- a/docs/internals/deprecation.txt
+++ b/docs/internals/deprecation.txt
@@ -114,6 +114,10 @@ their deprecation, as per the :ref:`Django deprecation policy
           :class:`~django.test.simple.DjangoTestRunner` will be removed in
           favor of using the unittest-native class.
 
+        * The undocumented function
+          :func:`django.contrib.formtools.utils.security_hash`
+          is deprecated, in favour of :func:`django.contrib.formtools.utils.form_hmac`
+
     * 2.0
         * ``django.views.defaults.shortcut()``. This function has been moved
           to ``django.contrib.contenttypes.views.shortcut()`` as part of the
diff --git a/docs/ref/contrib/formtools/form-wizard.txt b/docs/ref/contrib/formtools/form-wizard.txt
index ab7b4829c9..1bc4fa894c 100644
--- a/docs/ref/contrib/formtools/form-wizard.txt
+++ b/docs/ref/contrib/formtools/form-wizard.txt
@@ -240,7 +240,7 @@ Advanced ``FormWizard`` methods
     Calculates the security hash for the given request object and
     :class:`~django.forms.Form` instance.
 
-    By default, this uses an MD5 hash of the form data and your
+    By default, this generates a SHA1 HMAC using your form data and your
     :setting:`SECRET_KEY` setting. It's rare that somebody would need to
     override this.