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HIGH7.5

PYSEC-2026-4107

MPXJ: XXE Vulnerability in MerlinReader

Quick fix

PYSEC-2026-4107 — mpxj: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

pip install --upgrade 'mpxj>=16.4.1'

Details

### Impact MPXJ used the default configuration when creating a DocumentBuilder instance, which leaves doctype declarations enabled, when parsing the XML content of the ZTIMEINTERVALS column from a Merlin project SQLite file. This would allow a carefully crafted XML payload to read an arbitrary file. However, although an arbitrary file can be read, the way the resulting parsed XML is processed by MPXJ means that the data it contains is unlikely to be available for exfiltration.

### Patches The patch is included in MPXJ 16.4.1

### Workarounds Potential workarounds include: * Avoid reading Merlin project files with MPXJ * Only accept Merlin project files from trusted sources * Preprocess Merlin SQLite databases to strip doctype declarations from the ZTIMEINTERVALS column

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

PyPI/mpxj
Introduced in: 5.5.5Fixed in: 16.4.1
Fixpip install --upgrade 'mpxj>=16.4.1'

References