Vulnerability · Published Sep 14, 2026 · Assigned by VulnCheck
CVE-2026-91197Flowable flowable-engine through 8.0.0 XXE via ProcessDiagramLayoutFactory
Medium 6.5
In plain English
A medium-severity XML external entity in flowable-engine from flowable. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 40% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Flowable flowable-engine through 8.0.0 contains an XML external entity injection vulnerability in ProcessDiagramLayoutFactory.parseXml() that fails to disable external entity resolution when parsing deployed BPMN resources. Attackers with process deployment privileges can embed DOCTYPE declarations with external entities in BPMN files to read arbitrary local files or trigger requests to internal network endpoints when diagram layout is computed.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| flowable | flowable-engine | 0 – through 8.0.0 |
Weakness: CWE-611 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
References
- GitHub Issue #4216 issue-tracking
- https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine product
- https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/blob/0779d68e5a3385b74d8acb8bc37901ff54513249/modules/flowable-engine/src/main/java/org/flowable/engine/impl/bpmn/diagram/ProcessDiagramLayoutFactory.java#L101-L118 technical-description
- https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/blob/0779d68e5a3385b74d8acb8bc37901ff54513249/modules/flowable5-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/engine/impl/bpmn/diagram/ProcessDiagramLayoutFactory.java#L97-L114 technical-description
- VulnCheck Advisory: Flowable flowable-engine through 8.0.0 XXE via ProcessDiagramLayoutFactory third-party-advisory