CVE-2018-11796 Apache Tika is vulnerable to entity expansions which can lead to a denial of service attack

What is CVE-2018-11796?

CVE-2018-11796 is a high-severity vulnerability in Apache Tika, published on 9 Oct 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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.

Weakness: CWE-611

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-11796?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.tika:tika-core. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Tika.

How do I fix CVE-2018-11796?

Upgrade org.apache.tika:tika-core to 1.19.1 or later.

Is CVE-2018-11796 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-11796 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache Tika

• CVE-2019-10088 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Apache Tika High 8.8
• CVE-2025-66516 Apache Tika has XXE vulnerability High 8.4
• CVE-2025-54988 Apache Tika PDF parser module: XXE vulnerability in PDFParser's handling of XFA High 8.4
• CVE-2018-1335 Command injection in org.apache.tika:tika-core High 8.1
• CVE-2019-10094 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Apache Tika High 7.8

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-h8q5-g2cj-qr5h, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-11796.