Expat vulnerabilities

The overflow protection in Expat is removed by compilers with certain optimization settings, allowing remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via crafted XML data.

Expat allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a malformed input document, which triggers a buffer overflow.

expat before version 2.4.0 does not properly handle entities expansion unless an application developer uses the XML_SetEntityDeclHandler function. This allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (resource consumption), send HTTP requests to intranet servers, or read arbitrary files via a crafted XML document, aka an XML External Entity (XXE) issue.

The updatePosition function in libexpat (Expat 2.0.1) has a buffer over-read vulnerability. Crafted UTF-8 sequences in an XML document can cause an application crash.

Expat before 2.8.5 fails to validate that a high surrogate in UTF-16 input is followed by a low surrogate, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can supply UTF-16 encoded XML containing lone high surrogates that consume the following code unit, causing Expat to pass unpaired surrogates to applications built with XML_UNICODE and to silently replace input characters in other builds.

Expat through 2.8.3 contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that allows attackers to trigger memory corruption by processing XML with external entity parsers created via XML_ExternalEntityParserCreate. A struct size mismatch between ELEMENT_TYPE members causes storeAtts to read the attIndex member past allocated memory boundaries, resulting in failure to normalize whitespace in non-CDATA attributes or a wild pointer dereference causing a segfault. This vulnerability was introduced by the fix for CVE-2026-66046.

Denial of service vulnerability in Expat through 2.8.3. The storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c has quadratic complexity, causing excessive CPU consumption when processing an XML document with many attributes with non-normalized values.