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<section id="module-xml">
<span id="xml-processing-modules"></span><span id="xml"></span><h1>XML Processing Modules<a class="headerlink" href="#module-xml" title="Link to this heading">¶</a></h1>
<p><strong>Source code:</strong> <a class="extlink-source reference external" href="https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/3.14/Lib/xml/">Lib/xml/</a></p>
<hr class="docutils" />
<p>Python’s interfaces for processing XML are grouped in the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml</span></code> package.</p>
<div class="admonition note">
<p class="admonition-title">Note</p>
<p>If you need to parse untrusted or unauthenticated data, see
<a class="reference internal" href="#xml-security"><span class="std std-ref">XML security</span></a>.</p>
</div>
<p>It is important to note that modules in the <a class="reference internal" href="#module-xml" title="xml: Package containing XML processing modules"><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml</span></code></a> package require that
there be at least one SAX-compliant XML parser available. The Expat parser is
included with Python, so the <a class="reference internal" href="pyexpat.html#module-xml.parsers.expat" title="xml.parsers.expat: An interface to the Expat non-validating XML parser."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.parsers.expat</span></code></a> module will always be
available.</p>
<p>The documentation for the <a class="reference internal" href="xml.dom.html#module-xml.dom" title="xml.dom: Document Object Model API for Python."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.dom</span></code></a> and <a class="reference internal" href="xml.sax.html#module-xml.sax" title="xml.sax: Package containing SAX2 base classes and convenience functions."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.sax</span></code></a> packages are the
definition of the Python bindings for the DOM and SAX interfaces.</p>
<p>The XML handling submodules are:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p><a class="reference internal" href="xml.etree.elementtree.html#module-xml.etree.ElementTree" title="xml.etree.ElementTree: Implementation of the ElementTree API."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.etree.ElementTree</span></code></a>: the ElementTree API, a simple and lightweight
XML processor</p></li>
</ul>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p><a class="reference internal" href="xml.dom.html#module-xml.dom" title="xml.dom: Document Object Model API for Python."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.dom</span></code></a>: the DOM API definition</p></li>
<li><p><a class="reference internal" href="xml.dom.minidom.html#module-xml.dom.minidom" title="xml.dom.minidom: Minimal Document Object Model (DOM) implementation."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.dom.minidom</span></code></a>: a minimal DOM implementation</p></li>
<li><p><a class="reference internal" href="xml.dom.pulldom.html#module-xml.dom.pulldom" title="xml.dom.pulldom: Support for building partial DOM trees from SAX events."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.dom.pulldom</span></code></a>: support for building partial DOM trees</p></li>
</ul>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p><a class="reference internal" href="xml.sax.html#module-xml.sax" title="xml.sax: Package containing SAX2 base classes and convenience functions."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.sax</span></code></a>: SAX2 base classes and convenience functions</p></li>
<li><p><a class="reference internal" href="pyexpat.html#module-xml.parsers.expat" title="xml.parsers.expat: An interface to the Expat non-validating XML parser."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xml.parsers.expat</span></code></a>: the Expat parser binding</p></li>
</ul>
<section id="xml-vulnerabilities">
<span id="xml-security"></span><span id="id1"></span><h2>XML security<a class="headerlink" href="#xml-vulnerabilities" title="Link to this heading">¶</a></h2>
<p>An attacker can abuse XML features to carry out denial of service attacks,
access local files, generate network connections to other machines, or
circumvent firewalls.</p>
<p>Expat versions lower than 2.6.0 may be vulnerable to “billion laughs”,
“quadratic blowup” and “large tokens”. Python may be vulnerable if it uses such
older versions of Expat as a system-provided library.
Check <code class="xref py py-const docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">pyexpat.EXPAT_VERSION</span></code>.</p>
<p><a class="reference internal" href="xmlrpc.html#module-xmlrpc" title="xmlrpc: Server and client modules implementing XML-RPC."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">xmlrpc</span></code></a> is <strong>vulnerable</strong> to the “decompression bomb” attack.</p>
<dl class="simple">
<dt>billion laughs / exponential entity expansion</dt><dd><p>The <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs">Billion Laughs</a> attack – also known as exponential entity expansion –
uses multiple levels of nested entities. Each entity refers to another entity
several times, and the final entity definition contains a small string.
The exponential expansion results in several gigabytes of text and
consumes lots of memory and CPU time.</p>
</dd>
<dt>quadratic blowup entity expansion</dt><dd><p>A quadratic blowup attack is similar to a <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs">Billion Laughs</a> attack; it abuses
entity expansion, too. Instead of nested entities it repeats one large entity
with a couple of thousand chars over and over again. The attack isn’t as
efficient as the exponential case but it avoids triggering parser countermeasures
that forbid deeply nested entities.</p>
</dd>
<dt>decompression bomb</dt><dd><p>Decompression bombs (aka <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb">ZIP bomb</a>) apply to all XML libraries
that can parse compressed XML streams such as gzipped HTTP streams or
LZMA-compressed
files. For an attacker it can reduce the amount of transmitted data by three
magnitudes or more.</p>
</dd>
<dt>large tokens</dt><dd><p>Expat needs to re-parse unfinished tokens; without the protection
introduced in Expat 2.6.0, this can lead to quadratic runtime that can
be used to cause denial of service in the application parsing XML.
The issue is known as <span class="target" id="index-0"></span><a class="cve reference external" href="https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-52425"><strong>CVE 2023-52425</strong></a>.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
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