Opened 11 years ago

Closed 11 years ago

#21660 closed Uncategorized (invalid)

Password reset form return a successful answer when the email doesn't exist in the database

Reported by: anonymous Owned by: nobody
Component: contrib.auth Version: 1.6
Severity: Normal Keywords:
Cc: Triage Stage: Unreviewed
Has patch: no Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description

Hello,

The django.contrib password_reset view doesn't come with any machnism to handle the situation where the email doesn't exist in the database, it just send to a page telling that an email has been sent to the address.

For reference, password_reset https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/contrib/auth/views.py#L133-173 the email sending is done in the save of the form line 162. The query to grab the user (or list of user) in the form is here https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/contrib/auth/forms.py#L240-243

Also, the behavior to get the user(s) is strange, it can result of sending several time the same email to the same mail address, I really don't get the loop part, is it because of the test on user.has_usable_password()? If yes, then why there isn't a break at the end of the loop to prevent multiple sent emails. Or is it because of the case insensitive query?

Kinds regards,

Change History (3)

comment:1 by cortex@…, 11 years ago

comment:2 by Aymeric Augustin, 11 years ago

Regarding the first point, it's a security requirement, to avoid leaking the existence of an email in the database to a casual onlooker. (A serious attacker may be able to extract that information with a timing attack.)

comment:3 by Russell Keith-Magee, 11 years ago

Resolution: invalid
Status: newclosed

Regarding the second point - it's because email isn't a unique field on the default User model. As a result, a user could have multiple accounts. The reset email itself should (ideally) contain the username as well to provide a disambiguation.

Given that both points raised by this ticket seem to be a misunderstanding, closing the ticket invalid. There might be an argument to improve the documentation around these points; #21661 should cover that.

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