CVE-2025-66516 HIGH

CVE-2025-66516: Apache Tika core, Apache Tika parsers, Apache Tika PDF parser module: Update to CVE-2025-54988 to expand scope of artifacts affected

Vendor Apache Software Foundation
Product Apache Tika core
Weakness CWE-611 · XXE
Published December 4, 2025
Last update February 26, 2026

CVSS base score

8.4/10
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Confidentiality High
Integrity High

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

What the vulnerability does

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.

Key dates

Disclosure timeline

December 4, 2025 CVE published
February 26, 2026 Record updated