CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-55197 — pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library

High CVSS 7.5

pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library. Prior to version 6.0.0, an attacker can craft a PDF which leads to the RAM being exhausted. This requires just reading the file if a series of FlateDecode filters is used on a malicious cross-reference stream. Other content streams are affected on explicit access. This issue has been fixed in 6.0.0. If an update is not possible, a workaround involves including the fixed code from pypdf.filters.decompress into the existing filters file.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-08-13
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • pypdf_project / pypdf

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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