CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-18020 — Qpdf Project Qpdf security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.3

In QPDF 8.2.1, in libqpdf/QPDFWriter.cc, QPDFWriter::unparseObject and QPDFWriter::unparseChild have recursive calls for a long time, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via a crafted PDF file.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.3 (2.0)
Published
2018-10-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-674

Affected products

  • qpdf_project / qpdf / 8.2.1

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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