⚠️️️ Please note that this release is a part of CKEditor 4 Extended Support Model, only available to customers who decided to acquire the LTS (Long Term Support) version of the editor. All editor versions below 4.25.0-lts can no longer be considered as secure! ⚠️

Security Updates:

• Fixed reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Code Snippet GeSHi plugin reported by Jiasheng He from Qihoo 360.

  Issue summary: The vulnerability allowed a reflected XSS attack by exploiting a flaw in the GeSHi syntax highlighter library hosted by the victim. The GeSHi library was included as a vendor dependency in CKEditor 4 source files. In a specific scenario, an attacker could craft a malicious script that could be executed by sending a request to the GeSHi library hosted on a PHP web server. See GHA for more details.

• Fixed low-risk cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability linked to potential domain takeover

  Issue summery: A theoretical vulnerability has been identified in CKEditor 4.22 (and above). In a highly unlikely scenario where an attacker gains control over the https://cke4.ckeditor.com domain, they could potentially execute an attack on CKEditor 4 instances. Although the vulnerability is purely hypothetical, we have addressed it in CKEditor 4.25.0-lts to ensure compliance with security best practices. See GHA for more details.

You can read more details in the relevant security advisories. Contact us if you have more questions.

An upgrade is highly recommended!

Updated dependencies:

• CodeMirror (used only in the Toolbar Configurator in samples) has been updated to v5.65.17 for improved stability and performance.

• Highlight.js (used by the Code Snippet plugin) has been updated to v11.9.0, introducing two breaking changes:

  • dropped support for Internet Explorer,
  • updated list of the supported themes – some of the themes are no longer officially supported, others may have their names changed (e.g. monokai_sublime is now monokai-sublime). Please verify the value of your config.codeSnippet_theme configuration option and adjust theme names as needed. The list of available themes can be checked in the plugins/codesnippet/lib/highlight/styles directory.

⚠️️️ Please note that this release is a part of CKEditor 4 Extended Support Model, only available to customers who decided to acquire the LTS (Long Term Support) version of the editor. All editor versions below 4.24.0-lts can no longer be considered as secure! ⚠️

Security Updates:

• Fixed cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability caused by incorrect CDATA detection reported by Michal Frýba, ALEF NULA.

  Issue summary: The vulnerability allowed to inject malformed HTML content bypassing Advanced Content Filtering mechanism, which could result in executing JavaScript code. See GHA for more details.

• Fixed cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in AJAX sample reported by Rafael Pedrero, see INCIBE report.

  Issue summary: The vulnerability allowed to execute JavaScript code by abusing the AJAX sample. See GHA for more details.

• Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in samples with enabled the preview feature reported by Marcin Wyczechowski & Michał Majchrowicz, AFINE Team.

  Issue summary: The vulnerability allowed to execute JavaScript code by abusing the misconfigured preview feature. See GHA for more details.

You can read more details in the relevant security advisories. Contact us if you have more questions.

An upgrade is highly recommended!

Fixed Issues:

• Fixed: The CDATA parsing mechanism incorrectly detects the end of CDATA content. This fix unifies how style and script elements are parsed with the browser's behavior.

This release introduces the LTS (”Long Term Support”) version of the editor, available under commercial terms ("Extended Support Model").

If you acquired the Extended Support Model for CKEditor 4 LTS, please read the CKEditor 4 LTS key activation guide.

 This is the last open source release of CKEditor 4. As announced in 2018, CKEditor 4 has reached its End of Life in June 2023.

New Features:

• #5316: Added vertical margins support for list elements in the Paste from Word plugin.
• #5410: Added the ability to indicate the language of styles in the Styles Combo plugin via the config.styleSet configuration option.
• #5510: Added notification system to the editor informing users that the editor version is up-to-date and secure. See config.versionCheck configuration option to learn more.

Fixed Issues:

• #5437: Fixed: Incorrect indication of selected items in combo boxes. The selected item was unmarked upon each opening of the combo box.
• #5495: Fixed: Insufficient color ratio for links inside Notifications.

Other Changes:

• #5412: Prevent using document.domain in Firefox in the Preview plugin.

Security Updates:

A cross-site scripting vulnerability has been discovered affecting Iframe Dialog and Media Embed plugins.

This vulnerability might affect a small percentage of integrators that depend on dynamic editor initialization/destroy mechanism. See GitHub advisory for more details.

Potential breaking changes

In some rare cases, a security release may introduce a breaking change to your application. We have provided configuration options that will help you mitigate any potential issues with the upgrade:

• Starting from version 4.21, the Iframe Dialog plugin applies the sandbox attribute by default, which restricts JavaScript code execution in the iframe element. To change this behavior, configure the config.iframe_attributes option.
• Starting from version 4.21, the Media Embed plugin regenerates the entire content of the embed widget by default. To change this behavior, configure the config.embed_keepOriginalContent option.

If you choose to change either of the above options, make sure to properly configure Content Security Policy to avoid any potential security issues that may arise from embedding iframe elements on your web page.

You can read more details in the relevant security advisory and contact us if you have more questions.

An upgrade is highly recommended!

New Features:

• #4400: Added the config.uploadImage_supportedTypes configuration option allowing to change the image formats accepted by the Upload Image plugin. Thanks to SilverYoCha!

Fixed Issues:

• #5431: Fixed: No notification is shown when pasting or dropping unsupported image types into the editor.

Fixed Issues:

• #439: Fixed: Incorrect Tab and Shift+Tab navigation for radio buttons inside the dialog.
• #4829: Fixed: Undo reversed entire table content instead of a single cell. Thanks to that fix, multiple changes in a table can be undone one by one.
• #5396: Fixed: Event listeners for popstate and hashchange events on the window, added by the Maximize plugin, were not removed when destroying the editor instance.
• #5414: Fixed: File and image uploaders based on the Upload Widget plugin and Easy Image plugin didn't fire the change event upon finishing upload, resulting in passing incorrect data in form controls for integration frameworks, like Reactive forms in Angular.
• #698: Fixed: An error was thrown after applying formatting to the widget with inline editable and switching to the source mode. Thanks to Glen!

API changes:

• #3540: The startup data passed to the widget's command is now used to also populate the widget's template.
• #5352: Added the colorButton_contentsCss configuration option allowing to add custom CSS to the Color Button menu content. Thanks to mihilion!

Fixed Issues:

• #5333: Fixed: The original name of the uploaded image is not preserved by the Upload Image plugin if the Clipboard plugin has enabled image handling.
• #2881: Fixed: Changing table headers from "Both" to "First column" in the Table dialog does not change the first column cell correctly.
• #2996: Fixed: Table header "scope" attribute is incorrect for the "Headers: both" option in the Table dialog.
• #4802: Fixed: Tableselection caret moves to the previous cell after tabbing into the next cell and then removing its content.
• #5365: Fixed: The value of the config.baseFloatZIndex config variable is incorrectly applied to parent dialog when the child dialog is closed resulting in the dialog overlay covering up the dialog. Thanks to JenoDK!
• #5305: Fixed: Anchor name can invalidly include spaces.

New Features:

• #5084: Added the config.tabletools_scopedHeaders configuration option controlling the behaviour of table headers with and without the [scope] attribute.
• #5219: Added the config.image2_defaultLockRatio configuration option allowing to set the default value of the "Lock ratio" option in the Enhanced Image dialog.
• #2008: Extended the Mentions and Emoji plugins with a feature option that adds a space after an accepted autocompletion match. See:
  • configDefinition.followingSpace option for the mentions plugin, and
  • config.emoji_followingSpace option for the emoji plugin.
• #5215: Added the config.coreStyles_toggleSubSup configuration option which disallows setting the subscript and superscript on the same element simultaneously using UI buttons. This option is turned off by default.

Fixed Issues:

• #4889: Fixed: Incorrect position of the Table Resize cursor after scrolling the editor horizontally.
• #5319: Fixed: Autolink config.autolink_urlRegex option produced invalid links when configured directly using the editor instance config. Thanks to Aigars Zeiza!
• #4941: Fixed: Some entities got wrongly encoded when using entities_processNumerical = true configuration option.
• #4931: Fixed: Selecting the whole editor content when there is only a list with an empty element at the end inside and deleting it did not delete all list items.

API changes:

• #5122: Added the ability to provide a list of buttons as an array to the config.removeButtons config variable.
• #2008: Added Autocomplete followingSpace option that finishes an accepted match with a space.

Fixed Issues:

• #5125: Fixed: Deleting a widget with disabled autoParagraph by the keyboard backspace key removes the editor editable area and crashes the editor.
• #5135: Fixed: The checkbox.setValue and radio.setValue methods are not chainable as stated in the documentation. Thanks to Jordan Bradford!
• #5085: Fixed: The Language plugin removes the element marking the text in foreign language if said element does not have an information about the text direction.
• #4284: Fixed: Tableselection Merging cells with a rowspan throws an unexpected error and does not create an undo step.
• #5184: Fixed: The Editor Placeholder plugin degrades typing performance.
• #5158: Fixed: CKEDITOR.tools#convertToPx() gives invalid results if the helper calculator element was deleted from the DOM.
• #5234: Fixed: Easy Image doesn't allow to upload images files using toolbar button.
• #438: Fixed: It is impossible to navigate to the elementspath from the toolbar by keyboard and vice versa.
• #4449: Fixed: dialog.validate#functions incorrectly composes functions that return an optional error message, like e.g. dialog.validate.number due to unnecessary return type coercion.
• #4473: Fixed: The dialog.validate method does not accept parameter value. The issue originated in dialog.validate.functions method that did not properly propagate parameter value to validator. Affected validators:
  • functions
  • equals
  • notEqual
  • cssLength
  • htmlLength
  • inlineStyle
• #5147: Fixed: The Accessibility Help dialog does not contain info about focus being moved back to the editing area upon leaving dialogs.
• #5144: Fixed: Menu buttons and panel buttons incorrectly indicate the open status of their associated pop-up menus in the browser's accessibility tree.
• #5022: Fixed: Find and Replace does not respond to the Enter key.

API changes:

• #5184: Added the config.editorplaceholder_delay configuration option allowing to delay placeholder before it is toggled when changing editor content.
• #5184: Added the CKEDITOR.tools#debounce() function allowing to postpone a passed function execution until the given milliseconds have elapsed since the last time it was invoked.

New features:

• #2444: Togglable toolbar buttons are now exposed as toggle buttons in the browser's accessibility tree.
• #4641: Added an option allowing to cancel the Delayed Editor Creation feature as a function handle for editor creators (CKEDITOR.replace, CKEDITOR.inline, CKEDITOR.appendTo).
• #4986: Added config.shiftLineBreaks allowing to preserve inline elements formatting when the shift+enter keystroke is used.
• #2445: Added config.applicationTitle configuration option allowing to customize or disable the editor's application region label. This option, combined with config.title, gives much better control over the editor's labels read by screen readers.

Fixed Issues:

• #4543: Fixed: Toolbar buttons toggle state is not correctly announced by screen readers lacking the information whether the feature is on or off.
• #4052: Fixed: Editor labels are read incorrectly by screen readers due to invalid editor control type for the Iframe Editing Area editors.
• #1904: Fixed: Screen readers are not announcing the read-only editor state.
• #4904: Fixed: Table cell selection and navigation with the tab key behavior is inconsistent after adding a new row.
• #3394: Fixed: Enhanced image plugin dialog is not supporting URL with query string parameters. Thanks to Simon Urli!
• #5049: Fixed: The editor fails in strict mode due to not following the use strict directives in a core editor module.
• #5095: Fixed: The clipboard plugin shows notification about unsupported file format when the file type is different than jpg, gif, png, not respecting supported types by the Upload Widget plugin.
• #4855: [iOS] Fixed: Focusing toolbar buttons with an enabled VoiceOver screen reader moves the browser focus into an editable area and interrupts button functionality.

API changes:

• #4641: The CKEDITOR.replace, CKEDITOR.inline, CKEDITOR.appendTo functions are now returning a handle function allowing to cancel the Delayed Editor Creation feature.
• #5095: Added the CKEDITOR.plugins.clipboard.addFileMatcher function allowing to define file formats supported by the clipboard plugin. Trying to paste unsupported files will result in a notification that a file cannot be dropped or pasted into the editor.
• #2445: Added config.applicationTitle alongside CKEDITOR.editor#applicationTitle to allow customizing editor's application region label.