CVE-2025-9714: libxml2 Uncontrolled Recursion

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-9714 is a medium (CVSS 6.2) Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in libxml2. EPSS estimates a 0.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 4.5% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 10-09-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 12-05-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Uncontrolled recursion in XPath evaluation in libxml2 up to and including version 2.9.14 allows a local attacker to cause a stack overflow via crafted expressions. XPath processing functions `xmlXPathRunEval`, `xmlXPathCtxtCompile`, and `xmlXPathEvalExpr` were resetting recursion depth to zero before making potentially recursive calls. When such functions were called recursively this could allow for uncontrolled recursion and lead to a stack overflow. These functions now preserve recursion depth across recursive calls, allowing recursion depth to be controlled.

• CWE-674Uncontrolled RecursionThe product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.