CVE-2025-66516

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.

Predictions

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

References

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