Ref: https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2025/q4/238

Severity: critical

Affected versions:

• Apache Tika core (org.apache.tika:tika-core) 1.13 through 3.2.1
• Apache Tika parsers (org.apache.tika:tika-parsers) 1.13 before 2.0.0
• Apache Tika PDF parser module (org.apache.tika:tika-parser-pdf-module) 2.0.0 through 3.2.1

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.

References: Ref: https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2025/q4/238