CVE-2026-62296

HAPI FHIR: XHTML narrative parser unbounded recursion causes StackOverflow denial of service

State
Published
Severity
7.5 High
Published
Aug 7, 2026
Updated
Aug 10, 2026
Reserved
Jul 13, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

HAPI FHIR is a complete implementation of the HL7 FHIR standard for healthcare interoperability in Java. Prior to 6.9.11, XhtmlParser.java imposes no maximum element nesting depth, so a deeply nested text.div narrative triggers unbounded recursion between parseElementInner() and parseElement(), raising a StackOverflowError. An attacker who can submit FHIR resources containing such narratives can thus crash a parsing or validation worker thread, affecting validator services and any application that parses attacker-supplied FHIR JSON or XML. This issue is fixed in version 6.9.11.

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

Weaknesses

  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion

Affected Products

ProductVersions
org.hl7.fhir.corehapifhir
  • < 6.9.11Affected
ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.r5hapifhir
  • < 6.9.11Affected
ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.utilitieshapifhir
  • < 6.9.11Affected
ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.validationhapifhir
  • < 6.9.11Affected
ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.validation.clihapifhir
  • < 6.9.11Affected

References

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