CVE-2025-54988: Apache Tika PDF parser module: XXE vulnerability in PDFParser's handling of XFA

[Tim Allison <tallison () apache org>]

Severity: critical

Affected versions:

- Apache Tika PDF parser module
(org.apache.tika:tika-parser-pdf-module) 1.13 through 3.2.1

Description:

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.

Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.2, which fixes this issue.

Credit:

Paras Jain and Yakov Shafranovich of Amazon. (reporter)

References:

https://tika.apache.org/
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-54988