Use Safe Parsers in lxml Parsing Functions

[pixeebot]

This codemod sets the parser parameter in calls to lxml.etree.parse and lxml.etree.fromstring if omitted or set to None (the default value). Unfortunately, the default parser=None means lxml will rely on an unsafe parser, making your code potentially vulnerable to entity expansion attacks and external entity (XXE) attacks.

The changes look as follows:

  import lxml.etree
- lxml.etree.parse("path_to_file")
- lxml.etree.fromstring("xml_str")
+ lxml.etree.parse("path_to_file", parser=lxml.etree.XMLParser(resolve_entities=False))
+ lxml.etree.fromstring("xml_str", parser=lxml.etree.XMLParser(resolve_entities=False))

More reading

• https://lxml.de/apidoc/lxml.etree.html#lxml.etree.XMLParser
• https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/XML_External_Entity_(XXE)_Processing
• https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/XML_External_Entity_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet.html

I have additional improvements ready for this repo! If you want to see them, leave the comment:

@pixeebot next

... and I will open a new PR right away!

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[pixeebot]

I'm confident in this change, and the CI checks pass, too!

If you see any reason not to merge this, or you have suggestions for improvements, please let me know!

[pixeebot]

Just a friendly ping to remind you about this change. If there are concerns about it, we'd love to hear about them!