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.
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Meta Information
Published
2026-04-17
Last Modified
2026-04-22
Generated
2026-06-16
AI Q&A
2026-04-17
EPSS Evaluated
2026-06-15
NVD
CVE-2026-40260
Affected Vendors & Products
Showing 1 associated CPE
Vendor Product Version / Range
pypdf_project pypdf to 6.10.0 (exc)
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
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KEV
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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.
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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.

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.

Mitigation Strategies

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

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