What is the name of pythons built in module for xml processing?

XML vulnerabilities¶

The XML processing modules are not secure against maliciously constructed data. 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.

The following table gives an overview of the known attacks and whether the various modules are vulnerable to them.

1. Expat 2.4.1 and newer is not vulnerable to the “billion laughs” and “quadratic blowup” vulnerabilities. Items still listed as vulnerable due to potential reliance on system-provided libraries. Check pyexpat.EXPAT_VERSION.

2. xml.etree.ElementTree doesn’t expand external entities and raises a ParserError when an entity occurs.

3. xml.dom.minidom doesn’t expand external entities and simply returns the unexpanded entity verbatim.

4. xmlrpclib doesn’t expand external entities and omits them.

5. Since Python 3.7.1, external general entities are no longer processed by default.

The Billion Laughs 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.

A quadratic blowup attack is similar to a Billion Laughs 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.

Entity declarations can contain more than just text for replacement. They can also point to external resources or local files. The XML parser accesses the resource and embeds the content into the XML document.

Some XML libraries like Python’s xml.dom.pulldom retrieve document type definitions from remote or local locations. The feature has similar implications as the external entity expansion issue.

Decompression bombs (aka ZIP bomb) 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.

The documentation for defusedxml on PyPI has further information about all known attack vectors with examples and references.

The defusedxml Package¶

defusedxml is a pure Python package with modified subclasses of all stdlib XML parsers that prevent any potentially malicious operation. Use of this package is recommended for any server code that parses untrusted XML data. The package also ships with example exploits and extended documentation on more XML exploits such as XPath injection.