# 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.

- **Severity:** Low 2.9 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Not needed
- **Attackable:** Local or same network only
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** Yes
- **Published:** 1 Oct 2025
- **Updated:** 6 Oct 2025
- **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, USN-7803-1

## 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 (Uncontrolled Recursion)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-43718?


## How do I fix CVE-2025-43718?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

## Is CVE-2025-43718 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2025-43718 exists.

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2025-43718 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: 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.
Exploitation: It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2025-43718 exists.

Affected product: freedesktop Poppler. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-43718/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-43718/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-43718
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-43718
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2025-43718

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-43718/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.