Medium · published August 20, 2026
Etherpad is a real-time collaborative editor. From 2.1.0 until 3.1.0, Etherpad uses the attacker-controlled x-proxy-path request header in src/node/hooks/express/admin.ts when substituting paths into HTML, JavaScript, and CSS under /admin without sanitization, Vary: x-proxy-path, or Cache-Control: private, no-store. A shared proxy or CDN can cache the resulting response and serve attacker-injected script to an administrator. In src/node/hooks/express/specialpages.ts, version 3.0.0 also accepts a protocol-relative x-proxy-path value when constructing the /p/:pad/timeslider redirect, allowing redirection to an attacker-controlled host. The issues are exploitable when the deployment permits client-supplied x-proxy-path headers to reach Etherpad. This issue is fixed in version 3.1.0.