XML Processing Modules
**********************

**Source code:** Lib/xml/

======================================================================

Python’s interfaces for processing XML are grouped in the "xml"
package.

Note:

  If you need to parse untrusted or unauthenticated data, see XML
  security.

It is important to note that modules in the "xml" package require that
there be at least one SAX-compliant XML parser available. The Expat
parser is included with Python, so the "xml.parsers.expat" module will
always be available.

The documentation for the "xml.dom" and "xml.sax" packages are the
definition of the Python bindings for the DOM and SAX interfaces.

The XML handling submodules are:

* "xml.etree.ElementTree": the ElementTree API, a simple and
  lightweight XML processor

* "xml.dom": the DOM API definition

* "xml.dom.minidom": a minimal DOM implementation

* "xml.dom.pulldom": support for building partial DOM trees

* "xml.sax": SAX2 base classes and convenience functions

* "xml.parsers.expat": the Expat parser binding


XML security
============

An attacker can abuse XML features to carry out denial of service
attacks, access local files, generate network connections to other
machines, or circumvent firewalls when attacker-controlled XML is
being parsed, in Python or elsewhere.

The built-in XML parsers of Python rely on the library libexpat,
commonly called Expat, for parsing XML.

By default, Expat itself does not access local files or create network
connections.

Expat versions lower than 2.7.2 may be vulnerable to the “billion
laughs”, “quadratic blowup” and “large tokens” vulnerabilities, or to
disproportional use of dynamic memory. Python bundles a copy of Expat,
and whether Python uses the bundled or a system-wide Expat, depends on
how the Python interpreter "has been configured" in your environment.
Python may be vulnerable if it uses such older versions of Expat.
Check "pyexpat.EXPAT_VERSION".

"xmlrpc" is **vulnerable** to the “decompression bomb” attack.

billion laughs / exponential entity expansion
   The Billion Laughs attack – also known as exponential entity
   expansion – uses multiple levels of nested entities. Each entity
   refers to another entity several times, and the final entity
   definition contains a small string. The exponential expansion
   results in several gigabytes of text and consumes lots of memory
   and CPU time.

quadratic blowup entity expansion
   A quadratic blowup attack is similar to a Billion Laughs attack; it
   abuses entity expansion, too. Instead of nested entities it repeats
   one large entity with a couple of thousand chars over and over
   again. The attack isn’t as efficient as the exponential case but it
   avoids triggering parser countermeasures that forbid deeply nested
   entities.

decompression bomb
   Decompression bombs (aka ZIP bomb) apply to all XML libraries that
   can parse compressed XML streams such as gzipped HTTP streams or
   LZMA-compressed files. For an attacker it can reduce the amount of
   transmitted data by three magnitudes or more.

large tokens
   Expat needs to re-parse unfinished tokens; without the protection
   introduced in Expat 2.6.0, this can lead to quadratic runtime that
   can be used to cause denial of service in the application parsing
   XML. The issue is known as **CVE 2023-52425**.
