XXE in PHPSpreadsheet due to incomplete fix for previous encoding issue
Published 20 Nov 2019 · Updated 6 Mar 2025
Affected packages
- Affected
- <1.8.0
- Fixed in
- 1.8.0
composer require phpoffice/phpspreadsheet:^1.8.0- Affected
- <=1.8.2
- Fixed in
- No fix released
Details
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.
Is GHSA-vvwv-h69m-wg6f in any of your client repos?
Checking one package by hand is fine. Checking it across forty client projects is not. NPMscan reads the lockfiles in every GitHub repo you pick, finds each project with an affected phpoffice/phpspreadsheet, and gives you the command that fixes it.
References
- Advisorynvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-12331
- Linkgithub.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/pull/1041
- Linkgithub.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/commit/0e6238c69e863b58aeece61e48ea032696c6dccd
- Linkgithub.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/phpoffice/phpspreadsheet/CVE-2019-12331.yaml
- Packagegithub.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet
- Linkgithub.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#180---2019-07-01
- Linkgithub.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/releases/tag/1.8.0
- Linkherolab.usd.de/security-advisories/usd-2019-0046
Advisory data from OSV.dev (opens OSV.dev in a new tab), refreshed daily.