System.Xml.XmlReaderSettings class

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This article provides supplementary remarks to the reference documentation for this API.

You use the Create method to obtain XmlReader instances. This method uses the XmlReaderSettings class to specify which features to implement in the XmlReader object it creates.

See the Remarks sections of the XmlReader and Create reference pages for information about which settings to use for conformance checks, validation, and other common scenarios. See the XmlReaderSettings() constructor for a list of default settings.

Security considerations

Consider the following when using the XmlReaderSettings class.

  • The ProcessInlineSchema and ProcessSchemaLocation validation flags of an XmlReaderSettings object are not set by default. When these flags are set, the XmlResolver of the XmlReaderSettings object is used to resolve schema locations encountered in the instance document in the XmlReader. If the XmlResolver object is null, schema locations are not resolved even if the ProcessInlineSchema and ProcessSchemaLocation validation flags are set.

  • Schemas added during validation add new types and can change the validation outcome of the document being validated. As a result, external schemas should only be resolved from trusted sources.

  • Validation error messages may expose sensitive content model information. Validation error and warning messages are handled using the ValidationEventHandler delegate, or are exposed as an XmlSchemaValidationException if no event handler is provided to the XmlReaderSettings object (validation warnings do not cause an XmlSchemaValidationException to be thrown). This content model information should not be exposed in untrusted scenarios. Validation warning messages are suppressed by default and can be reported by setting the ReportValidationWarnings flag.

  • The SourceUri property of an XmlSchemaValidationException returns the URI path to the schema file that caused the exception. The SourceUri property should not be exposed in untrusted scenarios.

  • Disabling the ProcessIdentityConstraints flag (enabled by default) is recommended when validating, untrusted, large XML documents in high availability scenarios against a schema with identity constraints over a large part of the document.

  • XmlReaderSettings objects can contain sensitive information such as user credentials. You should be careful when caching XmlReaderSettings objects, or when passing the XmlReaderSettings object from one component to another.

  • DTD processing is disabled by default. If you enable DTD processing, you need to be aware of including DTDs from untrusted sources and possible denial of service attacks. Use the XmlSecureResolver to restrict the resources that the XmlReader can access.

  • Do not accept supporting components, such as NameTable, XmlNamespaceManager, and XmlResolver objects, from an untrusted source.

  • Memory usage of an application that uses XmlReader may have a correlation to the size of the parsed XML document. One form of denial of service attack is when excessively large XML documents are submitted to be parsed. You can limit the size of the document that can be parsed by setting the MaxCharactersInDocument property and then limit the number of characters that result from expanding entities by setting the MaxCharactersFromEntities property.