In short
- CVE-2026-31248 is a HIGH (CVSS 7.5) vulnerability affecting docling.
- Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days (EPSS): 0.28%, higher than 20.3% of all vulnerabilities.
- No patched version is listed yet: follow the vendor's advisory in References.
| Package | Affected versions | Patched versions |
|---|
| docling PyPI | ≤ 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.
NVD 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.
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