CVE-2026-76984

/// Technical description

Improper neutralization of input during web page generation in Apache Wicket.

org.apache.wicket.markup.head.MetaDataHeaderItem generates <meta> and <link> header tags. It escaped the attribute names it wrote, but ran the attribute values through a replacement of " with \". A backslash before a double quote means nothing in HTML, so a value containing a double quote ends its own attribute and what follows is parsed as further attributes of the generated tag.

An application is affected where it supplies an attribute value holding data an attacker can influence, through addTagAttribute or the forMetaTag and forLinkTag factory methods. A value may be given as an IModel, so it is not necessarily a literal.

There is no setting to change; an application can only avoid supplying a value that contains a double quote. Note that these values have never been escaped effectively: before the change released in 6.24.0, 7.4.0 and 8.0.0 they were written with no escaping at all.

This issue affects

/// Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from apache. Update wicket to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

/// Affected products

/// References