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Not in CISA KEV
HIGH severity

CVE-2025-53369 — short-description

HIGHFix: StarCitizenTools/mediawiki-extensions-ShortDescription@bc4fdba

CVE-2025-53369 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.6) Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in starcitizentools/short-description. A fix is available for starcitizentools/short-description — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Citizen Short Description stored XSS vulnerability through wikitext

Also known asGHSA-p85q-mww9-gwqf
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Nov 10, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

Proof-of-concept exploit code exists

  • CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
  • CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.

Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2025-53369.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
0.3%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs28th percentile — riskier than 28% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.29%0.58%0.86%0.4%0.4%0.3%0.3%0.3%May 26Oct 26Nov 26

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

1 pkg affected
🐘starcitizentools/short-description

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Packagist packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

Summary

Short descriptions are not properly sanitized by the ShortDescription before being inserted as HTML using mw.util.addSubtitle, allowing any user to insert arbitrary HTML into the DOM by editing a page.

Details

The description provided by the user via the {{SHORTDESC:}} parser function is insufficiently sanitized by the sanitize() function, as html entities are decoded: https://github.com/StarCitizenTools/mediawiki-extensions-ShortDescription/blob/7244b1e8b5cb6dbd7e546c5be7fed8a56e33d065/includes/Hooks/ParserHooks.php#L147-L159 Via JS, the short description is then passed to mw.util.addSubtitle, which inserts it as raw HTML: https://github.com/StarCitizenTools/mediawiki-extensions-ShortDescription/blob/7244b1e8b5cb6dbd7e546c5be7fed8a56e33d065/modules/ext.shortDescription.js#L8 https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/96372101b3c579d9992e8a31a3ccd90a937cac47/resources/src/mediawiki.util/util.js#L552-L563

PoC

  1. Enable ShortDescription
  2. Make sure $wgShortDescriptionEnableTagline is set to true (this is the default)
  3. Create a page and insert the following wikitext: {{SHORTDESC:<img src="" onerror="alert('shortdescription xss')">}}
  4. Visit the page

image image

Impact

Arbitrary HTML can be inserted into the DOM by any user, allowing for JavaScript to be executed.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
🐘Packagiststarcitizentools/short-description≥ 4.0.0&&< 4.0.14.0.1composer require starcitizentools/short-description:^4.0.1

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for starcitizentools/short-description, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update starcitizentools/short-description to 4.0.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-53369 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. 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

### Summary Short descriptions are not properly sanitized by the ShortDescription before being inserted as HTML using `mw.util.addSubtitle`, allowing any user to insert arbitrary HTML into the DOM by editing a page. ### Details The description provided by the user via the `{{SHORTDESC:}}` parser function is insufficiently sanitized by the `sanitize()` function, as html entities are decoded: https://github.com/StarCitizenTools/mediawiki-extensions-ShortDescription/blob/7244b1e8b5cb6dbd7e546c5be7fed8a56e33d065/includes/Hooks/ParserHooks.php#L147-L159 Via JS, the short description is then passed
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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CVE-2025-53369: short-description XSS — Fixed in 4.0.1