Expat through 2.8.4 fails to validate low surrogates following high surrogates in UTF-16 input, allowing malformed UTF-16 sequences to be accepted. Attackers can craft UTF-16 encoded XML with lone high surrogates that consume following code units, hiding markup characters from the parser and enabling XML injection attacks.
https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/pull/1282
https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/commit/ff6e1d7e750bbe245178f51a47a965dc8342861a
Published: 2026-09-19
Updated: 2026-09-19
Base Score: 7.8
Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:C/A:N
Severity: High
Base Score: 7.5
Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Severity: High
Base Score: 8.7
Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Severity: High
EPSS: 0.00347