madpah / madpah/serializable

defusedxml still required?

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#194 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement help wanted
Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Description

In https://github.com/madpah/serializable/pull/5, defusedxml has been introduced as a dependency to prevent XEE attacks.

According to the docs, defusedxml should not be required anymore with recent Python versions and the recommendation for defusedxml has been removed from the official Python docs after some discussions:

According to the table at https://github.com/tiran/defusedxml?tab=readme-ov-file#python-xml-libraries, the mentioned attacks should not be possible with modern Python anymore.

Is the dependency still required here?

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing pull request #5 and the dependency declaration to understand why defusedxml was added. Check the linked Python XML security guidance and defusedxml library table against this project's supported Python versions and XML behavior. Done means reaching a documented decision on whether the dependency can be removed without reintroducing the mentioned attacks.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
security
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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