VulnerabilityDeferred

CVE-2026-31248

Docling's METS GBS backend is vulnerable to XML Entity Expansion (XXE) attacks thru 2.61.0.

HIGH 7.5EPSS 0.28%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.28%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

Docling's METS GBS backend is vulnerable to XML Entity Expansion (XXE) attacks thru 2.61.0. The backend extracts and validates XML files from .tar.gz archives using etree.fromstring() without disabling entity resolution. An attacker can craft a malicious XML file with nested entity definitions (XML Bomb) and package it into a .tar.gz archive. When processed by Docling, the exponential expansion of entities during XML parsing leads to excessive resource consumption, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the system running the Docling parser.

CVSS 3.1: 7.5 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS: 0.28% probability · 20th percentile
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-776
Source: cve@mitre.org

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.