CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-33349 — fast-xml-parser allows users to process XML from JS object without C/C++ based libraries or callbacks

Medium CVSS 5.9

fast-xml-parser allows users to process XML from JS object without C/C++ based libraries or callbacks. From version 4.0.0-beta.3 to before version 5.5.7, the DocTypeReader in fast-xml-parser uses JavaScript truthy checks to evaluate maxEntityCount and maxEntitySize configuration limits. When a developer explicitly sets either limit to 0 — intending to disallow all entities or restrict entity size to zero bytes — the falsy nature of 0 in JavaScript causes the guard conditions to short-circuit, completely bypassing the limits. An attacker who can supply XML input to such an application can trigger unbounded entity expansion, leading to memory exhaustion and denial of service. This issue has been patched in version 5.5.7.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.9 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
javascript/npm
Weaknesses
CWE-1284

Affected products

  • naturalintelligence / fast-xml-parser
  • naturalintelligence / fast-xml-parser / 4.0.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 9 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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