Critical

Cross site scripting vulnerability with discussion titles

  • Disclosed: 21.11.2022
  • Updated: 11.10.2026 10:22

Flarum's page title system allowed for page titles to be converted into HTML DOM nodes when pages were rendered. The change was made after v1.5 and was not noticed.

This allowed an attacker to inject malicious HTML markup using a discussion title input, either by creating a new discussion or renaming one. The XSS attack occurs after a visitor opens the relevant discussion page.

Impact

All communities running Flarum from v1.5.0 to v1.6.1 are impacted.

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed and published as flarum/core v1.6.2. All communities running Flarum from v1.5.0 to v1.6.1 have to upgrade as soon as possible to v1.6.2 using:

bash
composer update --prefer-dist --no-dev -a -W

You can then confirm you run the latest version using:

bash
composer show flarum/core

Workarounds

None

For more information

For any questions or comments on this vulnerability please visit https://discuss.flarum.org/d/27558.

For support questions create a discussion at https://discuss.flarum.org/t/support.

A reminder that if you ever become aware of a security issue in Flarum, please report it to us privately by emailing security@flarum.org, and we will address it promptly.

Affected software

Click a technology to see all vulnerabilities affecting it.

PlatformPackageVulnerable versionsFixed in
Composer package flarum/core >= 1.5.0, < 1.6.2 1.6.2

References

CVSS score 9/10
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-79
Platform
Composer
Package
flarum/core
Disclosed
21.11.2022
Updated
11.10.2026 10:22

Sources and licenses

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-7x4w-j98p-854x - CC BY 4.0

Vulnerability history: flarum/core

All published vulnerabilities of this package (Composer package), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.

All (9) in the archive
Total entries
9
First → latest
06.2021 04.2026
Without a fix
0
Exploited in attacks
0

Severity breakdown

  • Critical 2
  • High 1
  • Medium 5
  • Low 1

Disclosures per year

  1. 2021: 1
  2. 2022: 1
  3. 2023: 4
  4. 2024: 1
  5. 2025: 1
  6. 2026: 1
Severity:
  1. High · 7.1 CVE-2023-40033 < 1.8.0 1.8.0
  2. Cross site scripting vulnerability with discussion titles this entry
    Critical · 9.0 CVE-2022-41938 >= 1.5.0, < 1.6.2 1.6.2
  3. Critical · 10.0 CVE-2021-32671 >= 1.0.0, < 1.0.2 1.0.2

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