Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-42445

Medium

Published: 06 October 2023

Published
06 October 2023
Modified
11 April 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 6.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0037 58.9th percentile
Risk Priority 14 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2023-42445 is a medium-severity Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Reference (CWE-611) vulnerability in Gradle Gradle. Its CVSS base score is 6.8 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked in the top 41.1% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. In some cases, when Gradle parses XML files, resolving XML external entities is not disabled. Combined with an Out Of Band XXE attack (OOB-XXE),…

more

just parsing XML can lead to exfiltration of local text files to a remote server. Gradle parses XML files for several purposes. Most of the time, Gradle parses XML files it generated or were already present locally. Only Ivy XML descriptors and Maven POM files can be fetched from remote repositories and parsed by Gradle. In Gradle 7.6.3 and 8.4, resolving XML external entities has been disabled for all use cases to protect against this vulnerability. Gradle will now refuse to parse XML files that have XML external entities.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

gradle
gradle
≤ 7.6.3 · 8.0.0 — 8.4.0

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-611

Penetration testing includes XML external entity payloads, detecting XXE vulnerabilities and enabling their mitigation.

addresses: CWE-611

Identifies XML external entity processing via monitoring of unusual file/network access or resource usage.

References