CVE-2025-9714: Xmlsoft LIBXML2

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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.

Affected products

• Xmlsoft LIBXML2: before 2.10.0 (fixed in 2.10.0)

Published 2025-09-10. Last modified 2026-06-17.