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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.8 CVE-2026-28338 EUVD-2026-9069GHSA-8rr6-2qw5-pc7r

PMD Designer has Stored XSS in VBHTMLRenderer and YAHTMLRenderer via unescaped violation messages

Published Feb 27, 2026 · Updated Mar 3, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

PMD is an extensible multilanguage static code analyzer. Prior to version 7.22.0, PMD's `vbhtml` and `yahtml` report formats insert rule violation messages into HTML output without escaping. When PMD analyzes untrusted source code containing crafted string literals, the generated HTML report contains executable JavaScript that runs when opened in a browser. Practical impact is limited because `vbhtml` and `yahtml` are legacy formats rarely used in practice. The default `html` format is properly escaped and not affected. Version 7.22.0 contains a fix for the issue.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
pmd pmd < 7.22.0 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Maven net.sourceforge.pmd:pmd-core < 7.22.0 7.22.0 GHSA-8rr6-2qw5-pc7r

References