CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-24808 — PDFio is a C library for reading and writing PDF files

Medium CVSS 6.5

PDFio is a C library for reading and writing PDF files. In versions prior to 1.1.0 a denial of service (DOS) vulnerability exists in the pdfio parser. Crafted pdf files can cause the program to run at 100% utilization and never terminate. The pdf which causes this crash found in testing is about 28kb in size and was discovered via fuzzing. Anyone who uses this library either as a standalone binary or as a library can be DOSed when attempting to parse this type of file. Web servers or other automated processes which rely on this code to turn pdf submissions into plaintext can be DOSed when an attacker uploads the pdf. Please see the linked GHSA for an example pdf. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-02-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • pdfio_project / pdfio

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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