CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-24428 — Adobe Acrobat security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.7

Acrobat Reader DC versions 2020.012.20048 (and earlier), 2020.001.30005 (and earlier) and 2017.011.30175 (and earlier) for macOS are affected by a time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability that could result in local privilege escalation. Exploitation of this issue requires user interaction in that a victim must open a malicious file.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.7 (3.1)
Published
2020-11-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-367

Affected products

  • adobe / acrobat
  • adobe / acrobat_dc
  • adobe / acrobat_reader
  • adobe / acrobat_reader_dc

Showing 4 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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