CVE-2026-44020

Docling: Unsafe XML Entity Expansion in USPTO Patent Backend

State
Published
Severity
7.5 High
Published
Jun 24, 2026
Updated
Aug 28, 2026
Reserved
May 4, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.5 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HGitHub_M
3.19.4 CriticalCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:Hredhat-SADP

Weaknesses

  • CWE-776 Improper Restriction of Recursive Entity References in DTDs ('XML Entity Expansion')
  • CWE-611 Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Reference

Affected Products

ProductVersions
doclingdocling-project
  • >= 2.13.0, < 2.74.0Affected

References

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