What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-26298: Injection in Redcarpet

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.4 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2021-01-11 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-74

Description

Redcarpet is a Ruby library for Markdown processing. In Redcarpet before version 3.5.1, there is an injection vulnerability which can enable a cross-site scripting attack. In affected versions no HTML escaping was being performed when processing quotes. This applies even when the `:escape_html` option was being used. This is fixed in version 3.5.1 by the referenced commit.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
• Redcarpet Project Redcarpet: before 3.5.1 — fixed in 3.5.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Redcarpet Project Redcarpet 3.5.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-q3wr-qw3g-3p4h
• https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#version-351-security
• https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet/commit/a699c82292b17c8e6a62e1914d5eccc252272793
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/01/msg00014.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/BFMYDIONVWATY7EB6EARDVXT47AYCRNM/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FNO4ZZUPGAEUXKQL4G2HRIH7CUZKPCT6/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PXNNWHHAPREDM3XJDACYRTK7DBMUONBI/
• https://rubygems.org/gems/redcarpet
• https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4831
• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-q3wr-qw3g-3p4h
• https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#version-351-security
• https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet/commit/a699c82292b17c8e6a62e1914d5eccc252272793

Get alerted when CVE-2020-26298 or the next vulnerability affects your stack