CVE-2021-21043 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.1) Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commons. A fix is available for com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commons — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Reflected Cross-site Scripting (XSS) in ACS Commons
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commonsReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Maven packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
ACS Commons version 4.9.2 (and earlier) suffers from a Reflected Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in version-compare and page-compare due to invalid JCR characters that are not handled correctly. An attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability to inject malicious JavaScript content into vulnerable form fields and execute it within the context of the victim's browser. Exploitation of this issue requires user interaction in order to be successful.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| ☕Maven | com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commons | all versions | 4.10.0com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commons:4.10.0 |
Affected Products
adobe consulting services commonsadobeDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commons, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update com.adobe.acs:acs-aem-commons to 4.10.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2021-21043 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Escape or sanitise the affected output on the server side rather than relying on client-side filtering, and add a Content-Security-Policy that blocks inline script execution so injected markup cannot run even if it reaches the page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2021-21043 in your dependencies?
Find it across Maven, including transitive dependencies.