CVE-2026-40260

Received Received - Intake

Memory Exhaustion via XMP Metadata in pypdf Before

Publication date: 2026-04-17

Last updated on: 2026-04-22

Assigner: GitHub, Inc.

Description

pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library. In versions prior to 6.10.0, manipulated XMP metadata entity declarations can exhaust RAM. An attacker who exploits this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to large memory usage. This requires parsing the XMP metadata. This issue has been fixed in version 6.10.0.

CVSS Scores

EPSS Scores

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Meta Information

Published

2026-04-17

Last Modified

2026-04-22

Generated

2026-07-06

AI Q&A

2026-04-17

EPSS Evaluated

2026-07-05

NVD

CVE-2026-40260

Affected Vendors & Products

Vendor	Product	Version / Range
pypdf_project	pypdf	to 6.10.0 (exc)

Helpful Resources

Exploitability

CWE

KEV

CWE ID	Description
CWE-776	The product uses XML documents and allows their structure to be defined with a Document Type Definition (DTD), but it does not properly control the number of recursive definitions of entities.

Attack-Flow Graph

Impact Analysis

Exploiting this vulnerability can cause the application using pypdf to consume a large amount of RAM, potentially leading to performance degradation or denial of service due to resource exhaustion.

Mitigation Strategies

To mitigate this vulnerability, upgrade the pypdf library to version 6.10.0 or later, where the issue has been fixed.

Executive Summary

This vulnerability exists in the pypdf library versions prior to 6.10.0. It involves manipulated XMP metadata entity declarations within a PDF file that can cause excessive RAM usage when the metadata is parsed.

An attacker can craft a specially designed PDF that triggers this behavior, leading to large memory consumption during processing.

This issue was fixed in version 6.10.0 of pypdf.

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