High Apache Ant CVEs

CVE	Severity	Published▾	Status	Exploitation	Description
CVE-2026-78254	High	2026-09-07	No exploit published	No public exploit	The ftp and scp tasks of Apache Ant can download files from a remote server. A malicious server can provide relative paths that allow it to write outside of the dedicated target directory for the download, making it possible to overwrite files of the attacker's choice using the permissions of the user running Ant in versions prior to Ant 1.10.18. In order to exploit this vulnerability, the server would either have to be malicious or be subject to a machine-in-the-middle attack. Additionally in the case of scp or the ftp task using ftps the server must pass the server identity checks performed by the tasks. For ftp tasks not using ftps a malicious server could act as a machine-in-the-middle to provide malicious files. Starting with Ant 1.10.18 both tasks will prevent writing outside of the destination directory by default. An option is available to disable this behavior in the unlikely case that the old behavior is required by existing build files. Mitigations: Users of scp and ftp (when using ftps) in any version of Ant should not bypass server identity checks. Users of ftp not using ftps should switch to ftps where possible. All users are recommended to upgrade to Apache Ant 1.10.18, which fixes this issue.
CVE-2021-40690	High	2021-09-19	No exploit published	No public exploit	All versions of Apache Santuario - XML Security for Java prior to 2.2.3 and 2.1.7 are vulnerable to an issue where the "secureValidation" property is not passed correctly when creating a KeyInfo from a KeyInfoReference element. This allows an attacker to abuse an XPath Transform to extract any local .xml files in a RetrievalMethod element.
CVE-2020-11979	High	2020-10-01	No exploit published	No public exploit	As mitigation for CVE-2020-1945 Apache Ant 1.10.8 changed the permissions of temporary files it created so that only the current user was allowed to access them. Unfortunately the fixcrlf task deleted the temporary file and created a new one without said protection, effectively nullifying the effort. This would still allow an attacker to inject modified source files into the build process.

CVE

Severity

Published▾

Status

Exploitation

Description

CVE-2026-78254

High

2026-09-07

No exploit published

No public exploit

The ftp and scp tasks of Apache Ant can download files from a remote server. A malicious server can provide relative paths that allow it to write outside of the dedicated target directory for the download, making it possible to overwrite files of the attacker's choice using the permissions of the user running Ant in versions prior to Ant 1.10.18. In order to exploit this vulnerability, the server would either have to be malicious or be subject to a machine-in-the-middle attack. Additionally in the case of scp or the ftp task using ftps the server must pass the server identity checks performed by the tasks. For ftp tasks not using ftps a malicious server could act as a machine-in-the-middle to provide malicious files. Starting with Ant 1.10.18 both tasks will prevent writing outside of the destination directory by default. An option is available to disable this behavior in the unlikely case that the old behavior is required by existing build files. Mitigations: Users of scp and ftp (when using ftps) in any version of Ant should not bypass server identity checks. Users of ftp not using ftps should switch to ftps where possible. All users are recommended to upgrade to Apache Ant 1.10.18, which fixes this issue.

CVE-2021-40690

High

2021-09-19

No exploit published

No public exploit

All versions of Apache Santuario - XML Security for Java prior to 2.2.3 and 2.1.7 are vulnerable to an issue where the "secureValidation" property is not passed correctly when creating a KeyInfo from a KeyInfoReference element. This allows an attacker to abuse an XPath Transform to extract any local .xml files in a RetrievalMethod element.

CVE-2020-11979

High

2020-10-01

No exploit published

No public exploit

As mitigation for CVE-2020-1945 Apache Ant 1.10.8 changed the permissions of temporary files it created so that only the current user was allowed to access them. Unfortunately the fixcrlf task deleted the temporary file and created a new one without said protection, effectively nullifying the effort. This would still allow an attacker to inject modified source files into the build process.