Poppler: User-assisted execution of arbitrary code

Background

Poppler is a cross-platform PDF rendering library originally based on Xpdf.

Description

Kees Cook from the Ubuntu Security Team reported that the CairoFont::create() function in the file CairoFontEngine.cc does not verify the type of an embedded font object inside a PDF file before dereferencing a function pointer from it.

Impact

A remote attacker could entice a user to open a specially crafted PDF file with a Poppler-based PDF viewer such as Gentoo’s Xpdf, Epdfview, or Evince, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Poppler users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-text/poppler-0.6.3"