CVE-2025-66516CRITICAL 9.8EPSS p99.6%
CVE-2025-66516CVE-2025-66516
Description
Critical XXE in Apache Tika tika-core (1.13-3.2.1), tika-pdf-module (2.0.0-3.2.1) and tika-parsers (1.13-1.28.5) modules on all platforms allows an attacker to carry out XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF.
This CVE covers the same vulnerability as in CVE-2025-54988. However, this CVE expands the scope of affected packages in two ways.
First, while the entrypoint for the vulnerability was the tika-parser-pdf-module as reported in CVE-2025-54988, the vulnerability and its fix were in tika-core. Users who upgraded the tika-parser-pdf-module but did not upgrade tika-core to >= 3.2.2 would still be vulnerable.
Second, the original report failed to mention that in the 1.x Tika releases, the PDFParser was in the "org.apache.tika:tika-parsers" module.
Scoring
| CVSS 3.1 | 9.8 (CRITICAL) |
| Vector | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H |
| EPSS | 79.81% probability of exploitation · percentile 99.6% · 2026-06-17T12:03:21Z |
| Published | 2025-12-04 |
| Last modified | 2025-12-30 |
Underlying weaknesses· 1
References
1
| Type | Target | Confidence | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weakness | Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Referencecwe-611 | 0% | live |
Related by meaning· 6
Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.