CVE-2018-8036 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition in Apache PDFBox

What is CVE-2018-8036?

CVE-2018-8036 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache PDFBox, published on 3 Jul 2018. 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 Apache PDFBox 1.8.0 to 1.8.14 and 2.0.0RC1 to 2.0.10, a carefully crafted (or fuzzed) file can trigger an infinite loop which leads to an out of memory exception in Apache PDFBox's AFMParser.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-8036?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Pdfbox.

How do I fix CVE-2018-8036?

Upgrade org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox to a fixed version for your release line: 1.8.15 or 2.0.11.

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-2018-8036 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-8036 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache PDFBox

• CVE-2016-2175 High severity vulnerability that affects org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox High 7.8
• 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
• CVE-2021-27906 A carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an OutOfMemory-Exception while loading the file Medium 5.5

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-8036, GHSA-j2xq-pfff-mvgg, SUSE-SU-2018:2630-1, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-8036.