CVE-2009-3431 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2009-3431?

CVE-2009-3431 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat, published on 25 Sep 2009. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Stack consumption vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.3, 9.1.2, 9.1.1, and earlier 9.x versions; 8.1.6 and earlier 8.x versions; and possibly 7.1.4 and earlier 7.x versions allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via a PDF file with a large number of [ (open square bracket) characters in the argument to the alert method. NOTE: some of these details are obtained from third party information.

Weakness: CWE-119

Which versions are affected by CVE-2009-3431?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat Reader.

How do I fix CVE-2009-3431?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2009-3431 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2009-3431 exists.

Public exploit code: 1 Exploit-DB entry.

Other vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat

• CVE-2021-28550 Adobe Acrobat and Reader Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.6
• CVE-2021-21017 Adobe Acrobat and Reader Heap-based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2014-0546 Adobe Reader and Acrobat Sandbox Bypass Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2014-0496 Adobe Reader and Acrobat Use-After-Free Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-3346 Adobe Reader and Acrobat Memory Corruption Exploited High 8.8

All Adobe Acrobat vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-7phm-f5vw-fc7p.