CVE-2025-66516: Apache Tika has XXE vulnerability
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.
Published Dec 4, 2025 · Updated Dec 5, 2025
Affected packages
org.apache.tika:tika-core
- Ecosystem
- Maven
- Affected
- >= 1.13, <= 3.2.1
- Fixed in
- 3.2.2
- Check
mvn dependency:tree -Dincludes=org.apache.tika:tika-core
org.apache.tika:tika-parsers
- Ecosystem
- Maven
- Affected
- >= 1.13, < 2.0.0
- Fixed in
- 2.0.0
- Check
mvn dependency:tree -Dincludes=org.apache.tika:tika-parsers
org.apache.tika:tika-parser-pdf-module
- Ecosystem
- Maven
- Affected
- >= 2.0.0, <= 3.2.1
- Fixed in
- 3.2.2
- Check
mvn dependency:tree -Dincludes=org.apache.tika:tika-parser-pdf-module
Advisory details
From the GitHub Advisory Database (CC BY 4.0).
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
How this page is made: the data panel comes from the GitHub Advisory Database, CISA’s KEV catalog, the NVD and FIRST EPSS, and updates twice a day. No analysis has been written for this entry yet. Methodology