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XXE Attacking Guide

Many different client technologies such as web, mobile, cloud and more – send messages to business applications using XML. In order for the application to work with these self-descriptive XML messages, it has to parse them and check that the format is correct.

This article will describe XML External Entity (XXE) injection attack and its basics in order to provide you with a better understanding of the attack and how to deal with it.

Since we will be talking about XXE injection, first we should understand the meaning of external entities and what they allow us to achieve.

External entities refer to data that an XML processor has to parse. They are useful for creating a common reference that can be shared between multiple documents. Any changes that are made to external entities are automatically updated in the documents which contain references to them. Meaning, XML uses external entities to fetch information or “content” – into the body of the XML document.

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