Cyber Resilience

CVE-2021-23980

MediumPublic PoC

Published: 16 February 2023

Published
16 February 2023
Modified
19 March 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 6.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0049 66.2th percentile
Risk Priority 12 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2021-23980 is a medium-severity Cross-site Scripting (CWE-79) vulnerability in Mozilla Bleach. Its CVSS base score is 6.1 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked in the top 33.8% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog; a public proof-of-concept is referenced.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

A mutation XSS affects users calling bleach.clean with all of: svg or math in the allowed tags p or br in allowed tags style, title, noscript, script, textarea, noframes, iframe, or xmp in allowed tags the keyword argument strip_comments=False Note:…

more

none of the above tags are in the default allowed tags and strip_comments defaults to True.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

mozilla
bleach
≤ 3.3.0

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-79

Penetration testing submits XSS payloads to web applications, detecting cross-site scripting flaws for subsequent remediation.

addresses: CWE-79

Validates web inputs to reject script-related content that could produce XSS.

addresses: CWE-79

Output validation against expected content can reject or sanitize script content in generated web pages, reducing XSS exploitability.

References