What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-64518: CycloneDX Core (Java): BOM validation is vulnerable to XML External Entity injection

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-11-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-611

Description

The CycloneDX core module provides a model representation of the SBOM along with utilities to assist in creating, validating, and parsing SBOMs. Starting in version 2.1.0 and prior to version 11.0.1, the XML `Validator` used by cyclonedx-core-java was not configured securely, making the library vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) injection. The fix for GHSA-683x-4444-jxh8 / CVE-2024-38374 was incomplete in that it only fixed parsing of XML BOMs, but not validation. The vulnerability has been fixed in cyclonedx-core-java version 11.0.1. As a workaround, applications can reject XML documents before handing them to cyclonedx-core-java for validation. This may be an option if incoming CycloneDX BOMs are known to be in JSON format.

Affected products

• cyclonedx-core-java: from 2.1.0, <11.0.1

References

• https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/XML_External_Entity_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet.html#schemafactory
• https://github.com/CycloneDX/cyclonedx-core-java/commit/162aa594f347b3f612fe0a45071693c3cd398ce9
• https://github.com/CycloneDX/cyclonedx-core-java/commit/af0ec75c93c03f93733a070c5132554490af5314
• https://github.com/CycloneDX/cyclonedx-core-java/pull/737
• https://github.com/CycloneDX/cyclonedx-core-java/security/advisories/GHSA-6fhj-vr9j-g45r

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