SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAnalyzed

CVE-2026-40186

A regression introduced in commit 49d0bb7, included in versions 2.17.1 of the ApostropheCMS-maintained sanitize-html package bypasses allowedTags enforcement for text inside nonTextTagsArray elements (textarea and option).

MEDIUM 6.1EPSS 0.25%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.25%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

ApostropheCMS is an open-source Node.js content management system. A regression introduced in commit 49d0bb7, included in versions 2.17.1 of the ApostropheCMS-maintained sanitize-html package bypasses allowedTags enforcement for text inside nonTextTagsArray elements (textarea and option). ApostropheCMS version 4.28.0 is affected through its dependency on the vulnerable sanitize-html version. The code at packages/sanitize-html/index.js:569-573 incorrectly assumes that htmlparser2 does not decode entities inside these elements and skips escaping, but htmlparser2 10.x does decode entities before passing text to the ontext callback. As a result, entity-encoded HTML is decoded by the parser and then written directly to the output as literal HTML characters, completely bypassing the allowedTags filter. An attacker can inject arbitrary tags including XSS payloads through any allowed option or textarea element using entity encoding. This affects non-default configurations where option or textarea are included in allowedTags, which is common in form builders and CMS platforms. This issue has been fixed in version 2.17.2 of sanitize-html and 4.29.0 of ApostropheCMS.

CVSS 3.1
6.1 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
EPSS
0.25% probability · 16th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-79
Affected
apostrophecms/apostrophecms · apostrophecms/sanitize-html
Source
security-advisories@github.com
EPSS trend
0%3%5%26 October 2026: 0.25%26 October 202626 October 2026

EPSS 0.2% since 26 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.