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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2018-11796 json

Apache Tika is vulnerable to entity expansions which can lead to a denial of service attack

published 2018-10-09 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-h8q5-g2cj-qr5h , EUVD-2018-0614

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
7.5%
EPSS 7.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 94%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • maven org.apache.tika:tika-core 1.19.1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2018-11796 updated cvss 7.5

tika: Incomplete fix allows for XML entity expansion resulting in denial of service

  • Red Hat BPM Suite 6 tika-core Red Hat JBoss BRMS 5 tika-core Red Hat JBoss BRMS 6 tika-core Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization 6 tika-core Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works 6 tika-core
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Satellite 5 tika
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Fuse 7.5.0
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2019:3892
  • Red Hat Software Collections rh-eclipse46-tika, rh-eclipse46-tika-java7, rh-eclipse46-tika-javadoc, rh-eclipse46-tika-parsers, rh-eclipse46-tika-serialization
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

7.54% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 94% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.apache.tika:tika-core
>=0.1, <1.19.1
1.19.1

Affected products

  • Apache Software Foundation Apache Tika

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-611 Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Reference

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.