Medium [CVE-2026-49461] Denial of Service via crafted PDF with self-referencing form XObject
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-49461 affecting Exploit Intelligence, OpenShift Lightspeed, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.
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Summary
pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library. Prior to 6.12.2, an attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to large memory usage.
This requires extracting the text of a page which contains a form XObject with self-references. This vulnerability is fixed in 6.12.2.
A flaw was found in pypdf. An attacker can craft a malicious PDF document containing a form XObject with self-references.
When a user attempts to extract text from a page within this crafted PDF, it can lead to excessive memory consumption. This vulnerability may result in a Denial of Service (DoS) due to resource exhaustion.
Moderate: A flaw in pypdf and python-PyPDF2 can lead to a denial of service due to excessive memory consumption. This occurs when processing a specially crafted PDF document containing self-referencing form XObjects during text extraction.
The vulnerability requires user interaction to trigger the text extraction process. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 5.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-835. Affected Red Hat products: Exploit Intelligence; OpenShift Lightspeed; Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2; Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) 3; Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI); Red Hat Quay 3.
Red Hat does not currently list a fixing RHSA for this CVE.
- < 6.12.2
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 15 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 15 days ago·verify at source
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