CVE-2020-1951 Infinite Loop in Apache Tika

What is CVE-2020-1951?

CVE-2020-1951 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 23 Mar 2020. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

A carefully crafted or corrupt PSD file can cause an infinite loop in Apache Tika's PSDParser in versions 1.0-1.23.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-1951?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.tika:tika. It affects 6 products.

Products include Apache Tika, Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Oracle Business Process Management Suite, Oracle Communications Messaging Server, Oracle Flexcube Private Banking.

How do I fix CVE-2020-1951?

Upgrade org.apache.tika:tika to 1.24 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2020-1951 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1951 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• 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

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2020-1951, GHSA-3264-3fm9-fg44, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-1951.