CVE-2025-66516
Apache Tika has XXE vulnerability
Description
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.
How to fix CVE-2025-66516
To remediate CVE-2025-66516, upgrade the affected package to a fixed version below.
- —upgrade to 1.22-2+deb11u1 or later
- —upgrade to 3.2.2 or later
- —upgrade to 3.2.2 or later
- —upgrade to 2.0.0 or later
Is CVE-2025-66516 being exploited?
Low — EPSS is 1.6%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.
Affected packages (4)
- from 0, < 1.22-2+deb11u1
- >= 1.13, < 3.2.2
- >= 2.0.0, < 3.2.2
- >= 1.13, < 2.0.0
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 4.0 | — | CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H |
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | CRITICAL9.8 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H |