Headline
CVE-2023-24808: Denial Of Service when opening a corrupt PDF file
PDFio is a C library for reading and writing PDF files. In versions prior to 1.1.0 a denial of service (DOS) vulnerability exists in the pdfio parser. Crafted pdf files can cause the program to run at 100% utilization and never terminate. The pdf which causes this crash found in testing is about 28kb in size and was discovered via fuzzing. Anyone who uses this library either as a standalone binary or as a library can be DOSed when attempting to parse this type of file. Web servers or other automated processes which rely on this code to turn pdf submissions into plaintext can be DOSed when an attacker uploads the pdf. Please see the linked GHSA for an example pdf. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
Summary
Short summary of the problem. Make the impact and severity as clear as possible. For example: An unsafe deserialization vulnerability allows any unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the server.
A DOS exists in the pdfio parser. crafted pdf files can cause the program to run at 100% utilization and never terminate. in practice, I verified with a 30 minute timeout time. the pdf which causes this crash is about 28kb in size and was discovered via fuzzing.
Details
Give all details on the vulnerability. Pointing to the incriminated source code is very helpful for the maintainer.
./pdfiototext pdfiototext-dos.pdf > test.txt will recreate this vulnerability (i will include a URL for the file download).
The underlying pdfiototext library is vulnerable, not just the pdfiototext executable.
This was discovered by fuzzing, i am unsure exactly what portion of the code is responsible.
PoC
Complete instructions, including specific configuration details, to reproduce the vulnerability.
I am unable to attach the pdf which causes this behavior directly to this report. I am providing a download URL and the file hash. If you would like me to submit the pdf in another way, please let me know.
pdfiototext-dos.pdf
shasum -a 256 pdfiototext-crash.pdf
e1abe17f703941295c171458fc593f7c1dc05b221c91b92684854f9989e03c2d pdfiototext-crash.pdf
Impact
What kind of vulnerability is it? Who is impacted?
Anyone who uses this library either as a standalone binary or as a library can be DOSed when attempting to parse this type of file. Web servers or other automated processes which rely on this code to turn pdf submissions into plaintext can be DOSed when an attacker uploads the pdf.
Related news
PDFio is a C library for reading and writing PDF files. In versions 1.1.0 and prior, a denial of service vulnerability exists in the pdfio parser. Crafted pdf files can cause the program to run at 100% utilization and never terminate. This is different from CVE-2023-24808. A patch for this issue is available in version 1.1.1.