Hi All,
We have a small lucee instance that is flagged for CVE-2025-54988; generally, I’m either able to upgrade or remove offending CVE’s, but any attempts I have to do this one end up with the system inoperable.
I tried upgrades from our standard 6.2.2.91 to zero, light, 7. I know I dont need the PDF functionality, but is there anything I’m missing on a way to clear this up? I even tried just pushing an upgrade, but it looks like it looks for org.lucee.tika-core:1.28.4 hard coded
As per the CVE, it’s about a vuln in a specific tika module tika-parser-pdf-module, Lucee only bundles the tika-core, which basically sniffs magic numbers rather than parsing files, which this CVE relates to.
So as Lucee doesn’t even bundle that jar, you have nothing to worry about
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-54988
Critical XXE in Apache Tika (tika-parser-pdf-module) in Apache Tika 1.13 through and including 3.2.1 on all platforms allows an attacker to carry out XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF. An attacker may be able to read sensitive data or trigger malicious requests to internal resources or third-party servers. Note that the tika-parser-pdf-module is used as a dependency in several Tika packages including at least: tika-parsers-standard-modules, tika-parsers-standard-package, tika-app, tika-grpc and tika-server-standard. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 3.2.2, which fixes this issue.
We are planning to update tika-core in 7.1 to the latest release.
Lucee 7 does have an ENV var to disable mime type detection, which uses Tika
It’s a hard discussion with security with it being flagged by anchore:
CVE-2025-54988+org.lucee.tika-core-1.28.4.jar
vulnerabilities package CRITICAL Vulnerability found in non-os package type (java) - /lucee/tomcat/lucee-server/bundles/org.lucee.tika-core-1.28.4.jar (fixed in: 3.2.2)(max_days_since_fix=3,fix_released=2025-08-26)(CVE-2025-54988 - NVD - CVE-2025-54988)
Are you saying that tika-core shouldn’t trigger it at all?
yep, whatever tool is reporting that is over zealous
if management or a client is still concerned about this, they are always welcome to sponsor some work
https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.tika/tika-core/1.28.4
