Red Hat JBoss EAP: CVE-2025-66516: Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Reference

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.. A XML External Entity (XXE) injection vulnerability was found in the Apache Tika framework's PDF parsing functionality. It could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to exploit the system by providing a specially crafted PDF containing an XFA (XML Forms Architecture) file. This flaw could lead to sensitive information disclosure or, potentially, Remote Code Execution (RCE) on the server. The issue affects multiple Tika modules, including tika-core, tika-pdf-module, and tika-parsers, within the version ranges 1.13 through 3.2.1.
This CVE expands on the scope of CVE-2025-54988 to clarify that the root cause and required fix reside in the tika-core module, regardless of which parser module is used.