Denial of Service via crafted PDF with malformed cross-reference streams

Summary

pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library. Prior to 6.14.0, an attacker can craft a PDF with repeated malformed cross-reference streams that cause pypdf to spend long runtimes recovering broken cross-reference table entries. This issue is fixed in version 6.14.0. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by crafting a malicious PDF file containing repeated malformed cross-reference streams. This could cause the pypdf library to spend excessive time recovering broken cross-reference table entries, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition for applications processing such files. An attacker could exploit this by providing a specially crafted PDF with malformed cross-reference streams, causing significantly extended processing time. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 6.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H). Weakness: CWE-1050. 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.