CVE-2025-43718 Denial of service in Poppler
Attackers can cause a crash and stack exhaustion in applications using Poppler by providing a malicious PDF with deeply nested metadata structures.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2025-43718?
CVE-2025-43718 is a low-severity denial of service vulnerability in freedesktop Poppler, published on 1 Oct 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Poppler 24.06.1 through 25.x before 25.04.0 allows stack consumption and a SIGSEGV via deeply nested structures within the metadata (such as GTS_PDFEVersion) of a PDF document, e.g., a regular expression for a long pdfsubver string. This occurs in Dict::lookup, Catalog::getMetadata, and associated functions in PDFDoc, with deep recursion in the regex executor (std::__detail::_Executor).
Weakness: CWE-674
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-43718?
How do I fix CVE-2025-43718?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
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-2025-43718 being exploited?
It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2025-43718 exists.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-43718, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-43718, ECHO-3e3b-ea76-5ba5, GHSA-77h4-r63x-87f8, SUSE-SU-2025:3898-1, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-43718 and 1 more.