What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-32796: Misinterpretation of malicious XML input in xmldom

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2021-07-27 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-116

Description

xmldom is an open source pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module. xmldom versions 0.6.0 and older do not correctly escape special characters when serializing elements removed from their ancestor. This may lead to unexpected syntactic changes during XML processing in some downstream applications. This issue has been resolved in version 0.7.0. As a workaround downstream applications can validate the input and reject the maliciously crafted documents.

Affected products

• xmldom: before 0.7.0 — fixed in 0.7.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: xmldom 0.7.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/xmldom/xmldom/commit/7b4b743917a892d407356e055b296dcd6d107e8b
• https://github.com/xmldom/xmldom/security/advisories/GHSA-5fg8-2547-mr8q
• https://mattermost.com/blog/coordinated-disclosure-go-xml-vulnerabilities/
• https://github.com/xmldom/xmldom/commit/7b4b743917a892d407356e055b296dcd6d107e8b
• https://github.com/xmldom/xmldom/security/advisories/GHSA-5fg8-2547-mr8q
• https://mattermost.com/blog/coordinated-disclosure-go-xml-vulnerabilities/

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