What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-44020: Docling: Unsafe XML Entity Expansion in USPTO Patent Backend

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-06-24 · updated 2026-10-25
• Weakness: CWE-776

Description

Docling simplifies document processing by parsing diverse formats and providing integrations with the generative AI ecosystem. From 2.13.0 until 2.74.0, the USPTO patent XML parser used the standard xml.sax.parseString() without protection against XML External Entity (XXE) attacks. An attacker could craft malicious USPTO patent XML files with external entity references that could read arbitrary files from the server filesystem, perform Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, or cause denial of service through entity expansion (Billion Laughs attack). The vulnerability affects three USPTO patent format parsers: ICE (v4.x), Grant v2.5, and Application v1.x. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.74.0.

Affected products

• docling-project docling: from 2.13.0 before 2.74.0 — fixed in 2.74.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: docling-project docling 2.74.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/docling-project/docling/security/advisories/GHSA-m88r-rg27-5xfg
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:60520
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-44020
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2492456
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-44020.json

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