VULNERABILITY INTELLIGENCE

CVE-2019-12331

CVSS score8.8 HIGH
EPSS probability1.35%
CISA KEVNot currently listed
Published2019-11-07
Last modified2026-06-17
CVSS vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Description

PHPOffice PhpSpreadsheet before 1.8.0 has an XXE issue. The XmlScanner decodes the sheet1.xml from an .xlsx to utf-8 if something else than UTF-8 is declared in the header. This was a security measurement to prevent CVE-2018-19277 but the fix is not sufficient. By double-encoding the the xml payload to utf-7 it is possible to bypass the check for the string ‚<!ENTITY‘ and thus allowing for an xml external entity processing (XXE) attack.

Weakness classification

  • CWE-611: Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Reference

Primary references