What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-14001

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 4.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-07-17 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-862

Description

The kramdown gem before 2.3.0 for Ruby processes the template option inside Kramdown documents by default, which allows unintended read access (such as template="/etc/passwd") or unintended embedded Ruby code execution (such as a string that begins with template="string://<%= `). NOTE: kramdown is used in Jekyll, GitLab Pages, GitHub Pages, and Thredded Forum.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 20.04
• Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 31, 32
• Kramdown Project Kramdown: before 2.3.0 — fixed in 2.3.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Kramdown Project Kramdown 2.3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/gettalong/kramdown
• https://github.com/gettalong/kramdown/commit/1b8fd33c3120bfc6e5164b449e2c2fc9c9306fde
• https://github.com/gettalong/kramdown/compare/REL_2_2_1...REL_2_3_0
• https://kramdown.gettalong.org
• https://kramdown.gettalong.org/news.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r96df7899fbb456fe2705882f710a0c8e8614b573fbffd8d12e3f54d2%40%3Cnotifications.fluo.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00014.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/ENMMGKHRQIZ3QKGOMBBBGB6B4LB5I7NQ/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/KBLTGBYU7NKOUOHDKVCU4GFZMGA6BP4L/
• https://rubygems.org/gems/kramdown
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20200731-0004/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4562-1/

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