CVE-2021-21283
Published: 26 January 2021
Summary
CVE-2021-21283 is a medium-severity Cross-site Scripting (CWE-79) vulnerability in Flarum Sticky. Its CVSS base score is 5.4 (Medium).
Operationally, ranked in the top 42.4% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2021-0503
Vulnerability details
Flarum is an open source discussion platform for websites. The "Flarum Sticky" extension versions 0.1.0-beta.14 and 0.1.0-beta.15 has a cross-site scripting vulnerability. A change in release beta 14 of the Sticky extension caused the plain text content of the first…
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post of a pinned discussion to be injected as HTML on the discussion list. The issue was discovered following an internal audit. Any HTML would be injected through the m.trust() helper. This resulted in an HTML injection where <script> tags would not be executed. However it was possible to run javascript from other HTML attributes, enabling a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack to be performed. Since the exploit only happens with the first post of a pinned discussion, an attacker would need the ability to pin their own discussion, or be able to edit a discussion that was previously pinned. On forums where all pinned posts are authored by your staff, you can be relatively certain the vulnerability has not been exploited. Forums where some user-created discussions were pinned can look at the first post edit date to find whether the vulnerability might have been exploited. Because Flarum doesn't store the post content history, you cannot be certain if a malicious edit was reverted. The fix will be available in version v0.1.0-beta.16 with Flarum beta 16. The fix has already been back-ported to Flarum beta 15 as version v0.1.0-beta.15.1 of the Sticky extension. Forum administrators can disable the Sticky extension until they are able to apply the update. The vulnerability cannot be exploited while the extension is disabled.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Penetration testing submits XSS payloads to web applications, detecting cross-site scripting flaws for subsequent remediation.
Validates web inputs to reject script-related content that could produce XSS.
Output validation against expected content can reject or sanitize script content in generated web pages, reducing XSS exploitability.