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

CISA KEV is observed exploitation evidence. FIRST EPSS is a dated prediction of exploitation in the next 30 days. Missing scores are unknown. This collector requests predictions only for explicit CVE aliases in the public NuGet archive; Microsoft release views retain their existing prediction scope.

No collected risk observation for these identifiers. This does not establish absence of exploitation or a zero probability.

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.

Source published

15 Oct 2026 18:36:49 UTC

Source modified

21 Oct 2026 01:04:51 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

Source terms

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CVSS 3.1 · 7.2 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N