CVE-2026-104828

HtmlUnit Neko: Mutation XSS (mXSS) in HTMLWriterFilter - TEXTAREA/TITLE entity decode without re-encode

State
Published
Severity
7.2 High
Published
Oct 15, 2026
Updated
Oct 21, 2026
Reserved
Oct 2, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

HtmlUnit Neko is an HtmlUnit adaptation of NekoHTML. Prior to 5.4.0, HTMLWriterFilter writes decoded TEXTAREA and TITLE character content without entity encoding because both elements are treated as special content. During a parse-and-serialize round trip, entity references inside these escapable raw-text elements are decoded by the parser and then emitted as raw markup by printCharacters(), changing the document's semantics. Applications that use htmlunit-neko in an HTML sanitizer, content filter, or other parse-transform-serialize pipeline can therefore turn attacker-controlled encoded text into executable markup when the output is rendered by a browser. This issue is fixed in version 5.4.0.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.2 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-79 Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Affected Products

ProductVersions
htmlunit-nekoHtmlUnit
  • < 5.4.0Affected

References

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