Last updated 4 September 2026
Improper Protection of Alternate Path vulnerability in Apache Tika.
This issue affects Apache Tika: from 4.0.0-alpha-1 before 4.0.0-beta-1.
Users are recommended to upgrade to version 4.0.0-beta-1, which fixes the issue.
An XXE issue in SAXBuilder in JDOM through 2.0.6 allows attackers to cause a denial of service via a crafted HTTP request.
A carefully crafted or corrupt PSD file can cause excessive memory usage in Apache Tika's PSDParser in versions 1.0-1.23.
A carefully crafted or corrupt PSD file can cause an infinite loop in Apache Tika's PSDParser in versions 1.0-1.23.
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.
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.
A carefully crafted or corrupt file may trigger a System.exit in Tika's OneNote Parser. Crafted or corrupted files can also cause out of memory errors and/or infinite loops in Tika's ICNSParser, MP3Parser, MP4Parser, SAS7BDATParser, OneNoteParser and ImageParser.
http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2020-9489 http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2020/q2/69 https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r4d943777e36ca3aa6305a45da5acccc54ad894f2d5a07186cfa2442c%40%3Cdev.tika.apache.org%3E
A carefully crafted or corrupt file may trigger a System.exit in Tika's OneNote Parser. Crafted or corrupted files can also cause out of memory errors and/or infinite loops in Tika's ICNSParser, MP3Parser, MP4Parser, SAS7BDATParser, OneNoteParser and ImageParser.
http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2020-9489 http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2020/q2/69 https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r4d943777e36ca3aa6305a45da5acccc54ad894f2d5a07186cfa2442c%40%3Cdev.tika.apache.org%3E
Apache Tika 1.19 included an incomplete fix for CVE-2018-11761 which added an entity expansion limit for XML parsing. However, Tika reuses SAXParsers and calls reset() after each parse, which, for Xerces2 parsers, as per the documentation, removes the user-specified SecurityManager and thus removes entity expansion limits after the first parse. Apache Tika 1.19 is therefore still vulnerable to entity expansions which can lead to a denial of service attack.
External Reference:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/88de8350cda9b184888ec294c813c5bd8a2081de8fd3666f8904bc05@%3Cdev.tika.apache.org%3E
Upstream Issue:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/TIKA/issues/TIKA-2727
Upstream Patch:
https://github.com/apache/tika/commit/86d4ba1e
A carefully crafted (or fuzzed) file can trigger an infinite loop in Apache Tika's BPGParser in versions of Apache Tika before 1.18.
A carefully crafted (or fuzzed) file can trigger an infinite loop in Apache Tika's ChmParser in versions of Apache Tika before 1.18.
Apache Tika before version 1.18 has a command injection vulnerability in tika-server. A remote attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary commands via crafted headers.
External References:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/b3ed4432380af767effd4c6f27665cc7b2686acccbefeb9f55851dca@%3Cdev.tika.apache.org%3E
Critical XXE in Apache Tika (tika-parser-pdf-module) in Apache Tika 1.13 through and including 3.2.1 on all platforms allows an attacker to carry out XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF. An attacker may be able to read sensitive data or trigger malicious requests to internal resources or third-party servers. Note that the tika-parser-pdf-module is used as a dependency in several Tika packages including at least: tika-parsers-standard-modules, tika-parsers-standard-package, tika-app, tika-grpc and tika-server-standard.
In Apache Tika 1.2 to 1.18, a carefully crafted file can trigger an infinite loop in the IptcAnpaParser.
In Apache Tika 0.9 to 1.18, in a rare edge case where a user does not specify an extract directory on the commandline (--extract-dir=) and the input file has an embedded file with an absolute path, such as "C:/evil.bat", tika-app would overwrite that file.
In Apache Tika 0.1 to 1.18, the XML parsers were not configured to limit entity expansion. They were therefore vulnerable to an entity expansion vulnerability which can lead to a denial of service attack.
All, FYI:
DARPA and ARPA-H are running a research competition called the "AI Cyber Challenge" (AIxCC). Its goal is to create automated tools that find and fix vulnerabilities in software. General information is here: <https://aicyberchallenge.com/>
The AIxCC semifinal competition was last week at DEF CON 32 (2024). All competitors were given an identical set of Challenge Projects, which were real-world OSS projects seeded with synthetic vulnerabilities. The projects were Jenkins, Linux kernel, Nginx, SQLite3, and Apache Tika. There were 7 winners; each winner received $2 million US as a reward, and those teams will be allowed to compete in the finals at next year's DEF CON.
An official summary is here: <https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2024-08-11>. Some other interesting links related to the semifinals include: <https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/08/09/trail-of-bits-buttercup-heads-to-darpas-aixcc/> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQKGWZvuLko>
One of the competing teams, Team Atlanta, even found a real-world bug in SQLite3. This was reported to SQLite through their usual process; it's fixed in trunk. More info about that specifically is here: - <https://x.com/TeamAtlanta24/status/1822739301463130271> - <https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/81670d1056>
The tools must be released by next year as open source software, with an OSI-approved license, as a condition for accepting prize money or competing in the final competition. Exact text is in the "Open-Source Requirement" section in its rules <https://aicyberchallenge.com/rules/>. The challenge problems were all based on real-world OSS, and the hope is that in the long term such tools can automatically find & fix vulnerabilities in all software including OSS.
Full disclosure: I work for the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and I have been working with DARPA & ARPA-H supporting this. That said, I thought others in this mailing list would want to know about it. No research is guaranteed to produce something leading to useful results, but I think this is a promising approach. We definitely could use tools that automatically find & fix vulnerabilities, if they're good enough!!
--- David A. Wheeler
Apache Tika provides optional functionality to run itself as a web service to allow remote use. When used in this manner, it's possible for a 3rd party to pass a 'fileUrl' header to the Apache Tika Server (tika-server) before version 1.10. This header lets a remote client request that the server fetches content from the URL provided, including files from the server's local filesystem. Depending on the file permissions set on the local filesystem, this could be used to return sensitive content from the server machine.
This vulnerability only exists if you are running the tika-server version 1.9, and you allow un-trusted access to the tika-server URL. Usage of Apache Tika as a standard library is not affected.
Apache Tika before 1.14 allows Java code execution for serialized objects embedded in MATLAB files. The issue exists because Tika invokes JMatIO to do native deserialization.
Apache Tika before 1.13 does not properly initialize the XML parser or choose handlers, which might allow remote attackers to conduct XML External Entity (XXE) attacks via vectors involving (1) spreadsheets in OOXML files and (2) XMP metadata in PDF and other file formats, a related issue to CVE-2016-2175.
A carefully crafted or corrupt sqlite file can cause an infinite loop in Apache Tika's SQLite3Parser in versions 1.8-1.19.1 of Apache Tika.
In Apache Tika 1.19 to 1.21, a carefully crafted 2003ml or 2006ml file could consume all available SAXParsers in the pool and lead to very long hangs. Apache Tika users should upgrade to 1.22 or later.