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OpenAdvisories
High · 7.5 CVE-2026-62296 EUVD-2026-54643

HAPI FHIR: XHTML narrative parser unbounded recursion causes StackOverflow denial of service

Published Aug 7, 2026 · Updated Aug 10, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

HAPI FHIR is a complete implementation of the HL7 FHIR standard for healthcare interoperability in Java. Prior to 6.9.11, XhtmlParser.java imposes no maximum element nesting depth, so a deeply nested text.div narrative triggers unbounded recursion between parseElementInner() and parseElement(), raising a StackOverflowError. An attacker who can submit FHIR resources containing such narratives can thus crash a parsing or validation worker thread, affecting validator services and any application that parses attacker-supplied FHIR JSON or XML. This issue is fixed in version 6.9.11.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
hapifhir org.hl7.fhir.core < 6.9.11 —
hapifhir ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.r5 < 6.9.11 —
hapifhir ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.utilities < 6.9.11 —
hapifhir ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.validation < 6.9.11 —
hapifhir ca.uhn.hapi.fhir:org.hl7.fhir.validation.cli < 6.9.11 —

References