VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2018-11796

Apache Tika versions from 0.1 to 1.19 are therefore still vulnerable to entity expansions which can lead to a denial of service attack.

HIGH 7.5EPSS 7.54%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (7.54%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

In Apache Tika 1.19 (CVE-2018-11761), we 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 versions from 0.1 to 1.19 are therefore still vulnerable to entity expansions which can lead to a denial of service attack. Users should upgrade to 1.19.1 or later.

CVSS 3.0: 7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS: 7.54% probability · 94th percentile
Public exploits: None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-611
Affected: apache/tika
Source: security@apache.org

EPSS trend

EPSS 7.5% since 27 October 2026; no change recorded yet. The dashed line is the ten per cent mark our analysts treat as “patch before the next change window”. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.