XML External Entity (XXE) Injection Affecting tika package, versions <1.22-1ubuntu0.1~esm2


Severity

Recommended
medium

Based on Ubuntu security rating.

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of Concept
EPSS
88.98% (100th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications
  • Snyk IDSNYK-UBUNTU2004-TIKA-14193234
  • published21 May 2026
  • disclosed4 Dec 2025

Introduced: 4 Dec 2025

CVE-2025-66516  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-611  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Ubuntu:20.04 tika to version 1.22-1ubuntu0.1~esm2 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream tika package and not the tika package as distributed by Ubuntu. See How to fix? for Ubuntu:20.04 relevant fixed versions and status.

Critical XXE in Apache Tika tika-core (1.13-3.2.1), tika-pdf-module (2.0.0-3.2.1) and tika-parsers (1.13-1.28.5) modules on all platforms allows an attacker to carry out XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF.

This CVE covers the same vulnerability as in CVE-2025-54988. However, this CVE expands the scope of affected packages in two ways.

First, while the entrypoint for the vulnerability was the tika-parser-pdf-module as reported in CVE-2025-54988, the vulnerability and its fix were in tika-core. Users who upgraded the tika-parser-pdf-module but did not upgrade tika-core to >= 3.2.2 would still be vulnerable.

Second, the original report failed to mention that in the 1.x Tika releases, the PDFParser was in the "org.apache.tika:tika-parsers" module.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1