GeoNetwork Fixes Unauthenticated RCE Chain Affecting Government Geoportal Backends
Two vulnerabilities in GeoNetwork can be chained to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on the open-source geospatial metadata catalog, which sits behind many government and agency geoportals. The project shipped fixes in versions 4.4.12 and 4.2.17 on July 8, 2026, and published the vulnerability details on August 31. GeoNetwork originated at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and is maintained under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It is a core component of many Spatial Data Infrastructure deployments across Europe and beyond, including the backend of the European INSPIRE geoportal. The chain combines a missing authorization check with an unsafe transformation engine. The first flaw, CVE-2026-63219 (CVSS score: 8.6), is a missing authorization check on the formatter upload endpoint. The unauthenticated file upload flaw allows an anonymous user to write arbitrary .xsl or .zip formatter files to the GeoNetwork f...
Sep 02, 2026