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CVE-2026-44020GHSA-M88R-RG27-5XFGPYSEC-2026-240

Docling: Unsafe XML Entity Expansion in USPTO Patent Backend

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 2.74.0
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: yes
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

Docling simplifies document processing by parsing diverse formats and providing integrations with the generative AI ecosystem. From 2.13.0 until 2.74.0, the USPTO patent XML parser used the standard xml.sax.parseString() without protection against XML External Entity (XXE) attacks. An attacker could craft malicious USPTO patent XML files with external entity references that could read arbitrary files from the server filesystem, perform Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, or cause denial of service through entity expansion (Billion Laughs attack). The vulnerability affects three USPTO patent format parsers: ICE (v4.x), Grant v2.5, and Application v1.x. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.74.0.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • docling-project docling

    From 2.13.0 · fixed in 2.74.0

  • doclingPyPI

    From 2.13.0 · fixed in 2.74.0

References 1

GitHub · docling-project/docling