CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-20551 — Freedesktop Poppler security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

A reachable Object::getString assertion in Poppler 0.72.0 allows attackers to cause a denial of service due to construction of invalid rich media annotation assets in the AnnotRichMedia class in Annot.c.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.0)
Published
2018-12-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • freedesktop / poppler / 0.72.0
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.10

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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