CA5372: Use XmlReader for XPathDocument

Property	Value
Rule ID	CA5372
Title	Use XmlReader for XPathDocument
Category	Security
Fix is breaking or non-breaking	Non-breaking
Enabled by default in .NET 8	No

Cause

Using the XPathDocument class instantiated without an XmlReader object can potentially lead to denial of service, information disclosure, and server-side request forgery attacks. These attacks are enabled by untrusted DTD and XML schema processing, which allows for the inclusion of XML bombs and malicious external entities in the XML. Only with XmlReader is it possible to disable DTD. Inline XML schema processing as XmlReader has the ProhibitDtd and ProcessInlineSchema property set to false by default in .NET Framework starting in version 4.0. The other options such as Stream, TextReader, and XmlSerializationReader cannot disable DTD processing.

Rule description

Processing XML from untrusted data may load dangerous external references, which can be restricted by using an XmlReader with a secure resolver or with DTD processing disabled. This rule detects code that uses the XPathDocument class and doesn’t take XmlReader as a constructor parameter.

How to fix violations

Use XPathDocument(XmlReader, *) constructors.

When to suppress warnings

You can potentially suppress this warning if the XPathDocument object is used to process an XML file that comes from a trusted source and hence cannot be tampered with.

Suppress a warning

If you just want to suppress a single violation, add preprocessor directives to your source file to disable and then re-enable the rule.

#pragma warning disable CA5372
// The code that's violating the rule is on this line.
#pragma warning restore CA5372

To disable the rule for a file, folder, or project, set its severity to none in the configuration file.

[*.{cs,vb}]
dotnet_diagnostic.CA5372.severity = none

For more information, see How to suppress code analysis warnings.

Pseudo-code examples

Violation

The following pseudo-code sample illustrates the pattern detected by this rule. The type of the first parameter of XPathDocument is not XmlReader.

using System.IO;
using System.Xml.XPath;
...
var obj = new XPathDocument(stream);

Solution

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.XPath;
...
public void TestMethod(XmlReader reader)
{
var obj = new XPathDocument(reader);
}