Vulnerability Spotlight: Use-after-free vulnerabilities in Foxit Reader could lead to arbitrary code execution

Aleksandar Nikolic of Cisco Talos discovered these vulnerabilities.

Cisco Talos recently discovered several use-after-free vulnerabilities in Foxit Reader that could lead to arbitrary code execution.

The Foxit Reader is one of the most popular PDF document readers, which aims to have feature parity with Adobe's Acrobat Reader. As a complete and feature-rich PDF reader, it supports JavaScript for interactive documents and dynamic forms. JavaScript support poses an additional attack surface.

Talos has identified four use-after-free vulnerabilities in Foxit Reader. The reader includes Javascript support to enable dynamic documents and multimedia content, which can be viewed interactively. A specially crafted PDF document can trigger the reuse of previously freed memory, which can lead to arbitrary code execution. An attacker needs to trick a user into opening a malicious file to trigger these vulnerabilities.

TALOS-2022-1600 (CVE-2022-32774)

TALOS-2022-1601 (CVE-2022-38097)

TALOS-2022-1602 (CVE-2022-37332)

TALOS-2022-1614 (CVE-2022-40129)

Cisco Talos worked with Foxit to ensure that these issues are resolved and an update is available for affected customers, all in adherence to Cisco's vulnerability disclosure policy.

Users are encouraged to update these affected products as soon as possible: Foxit Reader 12.0.1.12430. Talos tested and confirmed these versions of the reader could be exploited by these vulnerabilities.

The following Snort rules will detect exploitation attempts against these vulnerabilities: 60594-60595, 60604-60605, 60592-60593 and 60619-60620. Additional rules may be released in the future and current rules are subject to change, pending additional vulnerability information. For the most current rule information, please refer to your Firepower Management Center or Snort.org.