GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-9f4q-q82q-4359 Docling's METS GBS backend is vulnerable to XML Entity Expansion (XXE) attacks

HIGH Published 2026-05-11 Modified 2026-05-18 Official page ↗
Aliases
CVE-2026-31248
Ecosystem
PyPI
Packages
docling
Severity
High
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weaknesses
CWE-776
Reviewed
2026-05-18

Affected packages

• PyPI docling: <= 2.61.0 (no fix yet)

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.

Related

Alias · CVE (1)

  • CVE-2026-31248 Docling's METS GBS backend is vulnerable to XML Entity Expansion (XXE) attacks thru 2.61.0. vulnerability

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-776 Improper Restriction of Recursive Entity References in DTDs weakness

References