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MEDIUM severity

CVE-2020-26298 — redcarpet

MEDIUMFix: vmg/redcarpet@a699c82

CVE-2020-26298 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.4) CWE-74 vulnerability in redcarpet. A fix is available for redcarpet — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Injection/XSS in Redcarpet

Also known asGHSA-q3wr-qw3g-3p4h
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 10, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
1.6%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk+0.02%
Lower risk than most CVEs75th percentile — riskier than 75% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.70%1.39%2.09%0.3%1.6%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2020-26298 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 385,738 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
💎redcarpet

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects RubyGems packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

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 Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
💎RubyGemsredcarpetall versions3.5.1bundle update redcarpet --conservative

Affected Products

2 products · 3 configurations
OS
debian linuxdebian
2 versions
9.010.0
Application
redcarpetredcarpet_project
< 3.5.1
range

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for redcarpet, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update redcarpet to 3.5.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2020-26298 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. Workarounds

    Escape or sanitise the affected output on the server side rather than relying on client-side filtering, and add a Content-Security-Policy that blocks inline script execution so injected markup cannot run even if it reaches the page.

Frequently Asked Questions

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.
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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CVE-2020-26298: redcarpet XSS — Fixed in 3.5.1