XML External Entity (XXE) Injection Affecting org.graalvm.sdk:graal-sdk package, versions [,17.0.17)[21.0.0,21.0.9)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.06% (20th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-ORGGRAALVMSDK-13703823
  • published24 Oct 2025
  • disclosed21 Oct 2025
  • creditDarius Bohni

Introduced: 21 Oct 2025

NewCVE-2025-53066  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-611  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade org.graalvm.sdk:graal-sdk to version 17.0.17, 21.0.9 or higher.

Overview

org.graalvm.sdk:graal-sdk is a high-performance JDK distribution designed to accelerate the execution of applications written in Java and other JVM languages along with support for JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and a number of other popular languages.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) Injection via the XPathFactory instance. An attacker can access sensitive information or cause limited disruption by sending specially crafted input to the affected process.

Details

XXE Injection is a type of attack against an application that parses XML input. XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. By default, many XML processors allow specification of an external entity, a URI that is dereferenced and evaluated during XML processing. When an XML document is being parsed, the parser can make a request and include the content at the specified URI inside of the XML document.

Attacks can include disclosing local files, which may contain sensitive data such as passwords or private user data, using file: schemes or relative paths in the system identifier.

For example, below is a sample XML document, containing an XML element- username.

<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   <username>John</username>
</xml>

An external XML entity - xxe, is defined using a system identifier and present within a DOCTYPE header. These entities can access local or remote content. For example the below code contains an external XML entity that would fetch the content of /etc/passwd and display it to the user rendered by username.

<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
   <!ENTITY xxe SYSTEM "file:///etc/passwd" >]>
   <username>&xxe;</username>
</xml>

Other XXE Injection attacks can access local resources that may not stop returning data, possibly impacting application availability and leading to Denial of Service.

CVSS Base Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1