CVE-2018-11797 In Apache PDFBox a carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an extremely long running computation

What is CVE-2018-11797?

CVE-2018-11797 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Fedoraproject Fedora, published on 5 Oct 2018. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

In Apache PDFBox 1.8.0 to 1.8.15 and 2.0.0RC1 to 2.0.11, a carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an extremely long running computation when parsing the page tree.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-11797?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox. It affects 3 products.

Products include Apache Pdfbox, Fedoraproject Fedora, Oracle Retail Xstore Point of Service.

How do I fix CVE-2018-11797?

Upgrade org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox to a fixed version for your release line: 1.8.16 or 2.0.12.

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-2018-11797 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-11797 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Fedoraproject Fedora

• CVE-2016-2175 High severity vulnerability that affects org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox High 7.8
• CVE-2018-8036 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition in Apache PDFBox Medium 6.5
• CVE-2021-31811 A carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an OutOfMemory-Exception while loading a tiny file Medium 5.5
• CVE-2021-31812 A carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an infinite loop while loading the file Medium 5.5
• CVE-2021-27807 A carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an infinite loop while loading the file Medium 5.5

All Fedoraproject Fedora vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-11797, DLA-1547-1, GHSA-gx96-vgf7-hwfg, SUSE-SU-2018:3755-1, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-11797.