CVE-2016-2175: Apache PDFBox XML External Entity vulnerability

Severity: Important


Vendor:
The Apache Software Foundation

Versions Affected:
Apache PDFBox 1.8.0 to 1.8.11
Apache PDFBox 2.0.0
Earlier, unsupported Apache PDFBox versions may be affected as well

Description:
Apache PDFBox parses different XML data within PDF files such as XMP and the 
initialization of the XML parsers did not protect against XML External Entity 
(XXE) vulnerabilities. According to www.owasp.org [1]: "This attack may lead to 
the disclosure of confidential data, denial of service, server side request 
forgery, port scanning from the perspective of the machine where the parser is 
located, and other system impacts."


Mitigation:
Upgrade to Apache PDFBox 1.8.12 respectively 2.0.1

Credit:
This issue was discovered by Arthur Khashaev (https://khashaev.ru), Seulgi Kim, 
Mesut Timur and Microsoft Vulnerability Research.

[1] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XML_External_Entity_(XXE)_Processing