Use defusedxml for Parsing XML

[pixeebot]

You might be surprised to learn that Python's built-in XML libraries are considered insecure against various kinds of attacks.

In fact, the Python documentation itself recommends the use of defusedxml for parsing untrusted XML data. defusedxml is an open-source, permissively licensed project that is intended as a drop-in replacement for Python's standard library XML parsers.

This codemod updates all relevant uses of the standard library parsers with safe versions from defusedxml. It also adds the defusedxml dependency to your project where possible.

The changes from this codemod look like this:

- from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse
+ import defusedxml.ElementTree

- et = parse('data.xml')
+ et = defusedxml.ElementTree.parse('data.xml')

Dependency Updates

This codemod relies on an external dependency. However, we were unable to automatically add the dependency to your project.

This package is recommended by the Python community to protect against XML vulnerabilities.

There are a number of places where Python project dependencies can be expressed, including setup.py, pyproject.toml, setup.cfg, and requirements.txt files. You may need to manually add this dependency to the proper location in your project.

Manual Installation

For setup.py:

 install_requires=[
+    "defusedxml==0.7.1",
 ],

For pyproject.toml (using setuptools):

 [project]
 dependencies = [
+    "defusedxml==0.7.1",
 ]

For setup.cfg:

 [options]
 install_requires =
+    defusedxml==0.7.1

For requirements.txt:

+defusedxml==0.7.1

For more information on adding dependencies to setuptools projects, see the setuptools documentation.

If you are using another build system, please refer to the documentation for that system to determine how to add dependencies.

More reading

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.html#xml-vulnerabilities
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.html#the-defusedxml-package
• https://pypi.org/project/defusedxml/
• 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!

Powered by: pixeebot (codemod ID: pixee:python/use-defusedxml)

[pixeebot]

I'm confident in this change, but I'm not a maintainer of this project. Do you see any reason not to merge it?

If this change was not helpful, 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!

[pixeebot]

This change may not be a priority right now, so I'll close it. If there was something I could have done better, please let me know!

You can also customize me to make sure I'm working with you in the way you want.