CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-24996 — There is an invalid memory access in the function TextString::~TextString() located in Catalog.cc in Xpdf 4.0.2

High CVSS 7.8

There is an invalid memory access in the function TextString::~TextString() located in Catalog.cc in Xpdf 4.0.2. It can be triggered by (for example) sending a crafted pdf file to the pdftohtml binary, which allows a remote attacker to cause a Denial of Service (Segmentation fault) or possibly have unspecified other impact.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2020-09-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-665

Affected products

  • xpdfreader / xpdf / 4.0.2

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.