XML Entity Expansion (XML Bomb / Billion Laughs)

High Severity Technical Guide

Vulnerability Description

An XML entity expansion attack uses nested entities to crash the XML parser by exhausting memory and CPU resources (Denial of Service).

Remediation Guide

To resolve this vulnerability, follow these config changes or developer practices:

Disable DOCTYPE declarations in your XML parsing configurations, or restrict entity expansion limits strictly.

Verify Your Fix

After applying the remediation, run an external attack-surface scan to verify that the vulnerability is no longer detected by WebScanify.

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