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Expat allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a malformed input document, which triggers a buffer overflow.
Expat through 2.8.3 contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that allows attackers to trigger memory corruption by processing XML with external entity parsers created via XMLExternalEntityParserCreate. A struct size mismatch between ELEMENTTYPE members causes storeAtts to read the attIndex member past allocated memory boundaries, resulting in failure to normalize whitespace in non-CDATA attributes or a wild pointer dereference causing a segfault. This vulnerability was introduced by the fix for CVE-2026-66046.
Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XMLUNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.
libexpat through 2.9.0 contains a denial of service vulnerability because billion laughs protection in accountingDiffTolerated() in xmlparse.c detects entity amplification too late. Attackers can supply a moderately sized XML document with a large DTD and nested entity expansions to consume tens of seconds of CPU per parse.
libexpat before commit 13c5f63 contains a heap buffer over-read vulnerability in xmlparse.c. XMLParseBuffer advances the parse buffer end with parser->mbufferEnd += len using a caller-supplied length that is not validated against the allocated buffer size, so repeated XMLParseBuffer calls move mbufferEnd past the end of the heap allocation and subsequent parsing reads out of bounds. Reaching this path requires a parse buffer to already be present; otherwise XMLParseBuffer returns XMLERRORNOBUFFER. A buffer is present after a prior call to XMLGetBuffer, either directly (the common case) or indirectly through a prior XMLParse call that allocates the buffer internally. The over-read discloses adjacent heap memory to the calling application, recovering heap pointers, libc function pointers, and code pointers sufficient to defeat ASLR and build further exploitation primitives.
libexpat 2.7.2 through 2.8.5 Integer Overflow in expatrealloc
libexpat 2.7.2 through 2.9.0 contains a denial of service vulnerability because XMLParserReset zeroes the direct byte count but never offsets tracked heap allocations. Attackers can submit a large XML document so later documents on the same reset parser fail with XMLERRORNOMEMORY until it is recreated.
libexpat through 2.9.0 contains a signed integer overflow vulnerability in storeAtts() in lib/xmlparse.c that allows attackers to trigger out-of-bounds writes via oversized attribute counts. Attackers can supply a multi-gigabyte document with a start tag carrying over 2^30 attributes to overflow attIndex and nPrefixes, crashing applications or corrupting heap memory.
libexpat through 2.9.0 contains a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability in externalEntityInitProcessor2() in lib/xmlparse.c that mishandles the XMLTOKNONE token from empty input. Attackers who control stream chunking can force an empty non-final first parse on an external entity subparser, causing a later parse to crash the application.
The overflow protection in Expat is removed by compilers with certain optimization settings, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted XML data. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2015-1283 and CVE-2015-2716.
A stack overflow vulnerability exists in the libexpat library due to the way it handles recursive entity expansion in XML documents. When parsing an XML document with deeply nested entity references, libexpat can be forced to recurse indefinitely, exhausting the stack space and causing a crash. This issue could lead to denial of service (DoS) or, in some cases, exploitable memory corruption, depending on the environment and library usage.
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Last updated 21 September 2026
In libexpat before 2.8.1, the computational complexity of attribute name collision checks allows a denial of service via moderately sized crafted XML input.
XML External Entity vulnerability in libexpat 2.2.0 and earlier (Expat XML Parser Library) allows attackers to put the parser in an infinite loop using a malformed external entity definition from an external DTD.
libexpat in Expat before 2.7.2 allows attackers to trigger large dynamic memory allocations via a small document that is submitted for parsing.
In libexpat before 2.8.1, the computational complexity of attribute name collision checks allows a denial of service via moderately sized crafted XML input.
libexpat before commit 13c5f63 contains a heap buffer over-read vulnerability in xmlparse.c. XMLParseBuffer advances the parse buffer end with parser->mbufferEnd += len using a caller-supplied length that is not validated against the allocated buffer size, so repeated XMLParseBuffer calls move mbufferEnd past the end of the heap allocation and subsequent parsing reads out of bounds. Reaching this path requires a parse buffer to already be present; otherwise XMLParseBuffer returns XMLERRORNOBUFFER. A buffer is present after a prior call to XMLGetBuffer, either directly (the common case) or indirectly through a prior XMLParse call that allocates the buffer internally. The over-read discloses adjacent heap memory to the calling application, recovering heap pointers, libc function pointers, and code pointers sufficient to defeat ASLR and build further exploitation primitives.
Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c, where processing N specified attributes with non-normalized values triggers an O(N^2) linear scan of elementType->defaultAtts to determine CDATA status. A remote unauthenticated attacker can supply a single well-formed XML document of a few megabytes to an application parsing untrusted XML to cause excessive CPU consumption, resulting in denial of service without requiring authentication, external entity resolution, or non-default parser options.
Expat through 2.8.4 fails to validate low surrogates following high surrogates in UTF-16 input, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can craft UTF-16 encoded XML with lone high surrogates that consume following code units, hiding markup characters from the parser and enabling XML injection attacks.
In libexpat before 2.8.2, there is a heap-based buffer overflow in doProlog in xmlparse.c because scaffold backing array reallocation is mishandled when there is data-structure sharing across parsers.
Last updated 21 September 2026
Last updated 21 September 2026
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