A Comprehensive Guide to Protecting Your Applications from XXE Vulnerabilities
Understanding XML External Entity (XXE) Attacks: Working Principle, Exploitation, and Prevention Techniques | Karthikeyan Nagaraj
3 min readApr 18, 2023
Introduction:
- In today’s digital age, web applications and APIs are essential components of modern business operations.
- However, these technologies are also highly vulnerable to cyberattacks, including XML External Entity (XXE) attacks.
- XXE attacks are a type of injection attack that exploit weaknesses in the XML parsing process to access sensitive data and execute remote code.
- This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide to XXE attacks, including their working principle, exploitation techniques, and prevention measures.
Working Principle of XXE Attacks:
- XXE attacks target applications that use XML to exchange data between different systems.
- An XML document contains a reference to an external entity, which can be a file, a web page, or any other resource.
- The XML parser resolves the external entity reference and includes the content of the entity in the parsed…
