CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-42358 — PDFio is a simple C library for reading and writing PDF files

Medium CVSS 6.2

PDFio is a simple C library for reading and writing PDF files. There is a denial of service (DOS) vulnerability in the TTF parser. Maliciously crafted TTF files can cause the program to utilize 100% of the Memory and enter an infinite loop. This can also lead to a heap-buffer-overflow vulnerability. An infinite loop occurs in the read_camp function by nGroups value. The ttf.h library is vulnerable. A value called nGroups is extracted from the file, and by changing that value, you can cause the program to utilize 100% of the Memory and enter an infinite loop. If the value of nGroups in the file is small, an infinite loop will not occur. This library, whether used as a standalone binary or as part of another application, is vulnerable to DOS attacks when parsing certain types of files. Automated systems, including web servers that use this code to convert PDF submissions into plaintext, can be DOSed if an attacker uploads a malicious TTF file. This issue has been addressed in release version 1.3.1. All users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.2 (3.1)
Published
2024-08-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • msweet / 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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