Special characters break path parsing in XML functions
At a glance
Severity
MEDIUM 5.3
EPSS
EPSS 25.31 % · percentile 98 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
php
NVD status
Modified
Description
In PHP versions 7.3.x below 7.3.33, 7.4.x below 7.4.26 and 8.0.x below 8.0.13, certain XML parsing functions, like simplexml_load_file(), URL-decode the filename passed to them. If that filename contains URL-encoded NUL character, this may cause the function to interpret this as the end of the filename, thus interpreting the filename differently from what the user intended, which may lead it to reading a different file than intended.
