Vulnerability Database

383,304

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2026-44282 — decidim-elections

Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Description

A low-privilege process-scoped admin who can manage elections can store arbitrary HTML in the question statement/body without sanitization, and the public elections UI renders that value unsafely.

Technical description

This stored XSS appears because election question titles are rendered as trusted HTML instead of sanitized text. The election question editor stores question.body as a normal translatable string, and the public helper question_title returns that value with html_safe and no sanitization boundary, so any user who can edit election questions can persist markup or script-bearing payloads that later render on public election pages.

<img width="1506" height="1285" alt="decidim-election-01" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2e17f396-10f9-4423-bb97-5badbdb20d21" /> <img width="1540" height="657" alt="decidim-election-02" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/178adb7b-d00e-4b5d-9237-f391e523973f" />

Impact

A low-privilege process-scoped admin or other election editor with question-management rights can persist JavaScript that executes in visitor's browsers on public election pages and voting booth screens.

Patches

See https://github.com/decidim/decidim/pull/16659

Workarounds

Developers should review their implementation's administrator accesses and not give access to untrustworthy users

Resources

OWASP XSS Injection

Credits

This issue was discovered in a security audit organized by the Decidim Association and made by Radically Open Security against Decidim financed by NGI.

CVSS v3:

  • Severity: Medium
  • Score: 4.8
  • AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N

Frequently Asked Questions

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.