CVE-2018-20662 Denial of service in n/a

Medium 6.5 Published 3 Jan 2019 Updated 5 Aug 2024

Attackers can cause a denial-of-service crash in Poppler by crafting a malicious PDF file with a malformed xref structure.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Over the internet
Victim action needed: A user has to click or open something
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2018-20662?

CVE-2018-20662 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 3 Jan 2019. 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

In Poppler 0.72.0, PDFDoc::setup in PDFDoc.cc allows attackers to cause a denial-of-service (application crash caused by Object.h SIGABRT, because of a wrong return value from PDFDoc::setup) by crafting a PDF file in which an xref data structure is mishandled during extractPDFSubtype processing.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-20662?

It affects 11 products.

Linux distribution packages (7)

`poppler` SUSE:Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP5	All versions	`0.43.0-16.43.1`
`poppler-qt` SUSE:Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP5	All versions	`0.43.0-16.43.1`
`poppler` SUSE:Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 12 SP5	All versions	`0.43.0-16.43.1`
`poppler-qt` SUSE:Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 12 SP5	All versions	`0.43.0-16.43.1`
`poppler` SUSE:Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit 12 SP5	All versions	`0.43.0-16.43.1`
`poppler-qt` SUSE:Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit 12 SP5	All versions	`0.43.0-16.43.1`
`poppler` openSUSE:Leap 15.4	All versions	`0.62.0-150000.4.34.1`

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Freedesktop Poppler, Redhat Enterprise Linux, Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop and 5 more.

How do I fix CVE-2018-20662?

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-2018-20662 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-20662 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-20662, GHSA-mwx3-cc72-hfg4, SUSE-SU-2023:4690-1, SUSE-SU-2023:4942-1, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-20662.