Remark42: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) on /api/v1/img via content-type spoofing

Summary

Remark42 is a self-hosted comment engine for blogs, articles, or any other place where readers can add comments. Versions 1.6.0 through 1.15.0 contain a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability exploitable through content-type spoofing. The Remark42 image proxy fetches an arbitrary remote URL and re-serves the response from Remark42's own origin. During the download phase, the proxy determines whether the resource is an image by inspecting only the Content-Type header advertised by the remote server, never examining the actual bytes; during the serving phase, it instead derives the response Content-Type by sniffing those bytes with http.DetectContentType. An attacker can exploit this inconsistency by hosting a URL that advertises Content-Type: image/png while returning an HTML/JavaScript body: the download check accepts it as an image, the serving path sniffs the body and emits Content-Type: text/html, and the browser renders the attacker-controlled HTML/JavaScript as a document within Remark42's origin. Exploitation requires no Remark42 account on the target instance; the attacker only needs to host the malicious upstream URL and deliver the proxy link to a victim by any means, such as email, direct message, or a link on another website. This issue has been fixed in version 1.16.0.

Timeline

1. Jun 16, 2026, 10:29 PM UTCCVE published
2. Jun 17, 2026, 1:19 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Jun 17, 2026, 1:20 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• umputun remark42

  From 1.6.0 · fixed in 1.16.0

• github.com/umputun/remark42Go

  From 1.6.0 · fixed in 1.16.0

References 3