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Fencer Intel
high 8.1

CVE-2020-28502 json

Arbitrary Code Injection

published 5y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-h4j5-c7cj-74xg , EUVD-2021-1094

cvss
8.1
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
4.6%
EPSS 4.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 91%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

This affects the package xmlhttprequest before 1.7.0; all versions of package xmlhttprequest-ssl. Provided requests are sent synchronously (async=False on xhr.open), malicious user input flowing into xhr.send could result in arbitrary code being injected and run.

Patch / fix

  • npm xmlhttprequest 1.7.0
  • npm xmlhttprequest-ssl 1.6.2
  • n/a xmlhttprequest 1.7.0
  • node-xmlhttprequest Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.8.0-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-28502

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2020-28502 updated cvss 8.1

nodejs-xmlhttprequest: Code injection through user input to xhr.send

  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 1 servicemesh-grafana, servicemesh-grafana-prometheus Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 servicemesh-grafana, servicemesh-grafana-prometheus Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2 xmlhttprequest Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 nodejs-xmlhttprequest Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 nodejs-xmlhttprequest Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift4/ose-grafana, openshift4/ose-metering-presto
    +1 more products
    Red Hat Quay 3 quay/quay-rhel8
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

4.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 91% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • snyk.io https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-XMLHTTPREQUEST-1082935 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • snyk.io https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-XMLHTTPREQUESTSSL-1082936 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • snyk.io https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-1082937 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • snyk.io https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-1082938 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 8.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H/E:P/RL:O/RC:C
CNA 3.1 8.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 8.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm xmlhttprequest
<1.7.0
1.7.0
npm xmlhttprequest-ssl
<1.6.2
1.6.2

Affected products

  • n/a xmlhttprequest
  • n/a xmlhttprequest-ssl

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-94 Improper Control of Generation of Code

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.