CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-50420 — Freedesktop Poppler security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

An issue in the pdfseparate utility of freedesktop poppler v25.04.0 allows attackers to cause an infinite recursion via supplying a crafted PDF file. This can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS).

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-08-04
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-674

Affected products

  • freedesktop / poppler

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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