GHSA-f58c-gq56-vjjf: Apache Tika has XXE vulnerability

1. GitHub Advisory Database
2. GitHub Reviewed
3. CVE-2025-66516

Apache Tika has XXE vulnerability

Critical severity GitHub Reviewed Published Dec 4, 2025 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Dec 5, 2025

Package

maven org.apache.tika:tika-core (Maven)

Affected versions

>= 1.13, <= 3.2.1

maven org.apache.tika:tika-parser-pdf-module (Maven)

maven org.apache.tika:tika-parsers (Maven)

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.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-66516
• https://cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-54988
• https://lists.apache.org/thread/s5x3k93nhbkqzztp1olxotoyjpdlps9k

Published to the GitHub Advisory Database

Dec 4, 2025