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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2018-11797 json

In Apache PDFBox a carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an extremely long running computation

published 2018-10-05 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-gx96-vgf7-hwfg , EUVD-2018-0607

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.5%
EPSS 3.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 89%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In Apache PDFBox 1.8.0 to 1.8.15 and 2.0.0RC1 to 2.0.11, a carefully crafted PDF file can trigger an extremely long running computation when parsing the page tree.

Patch / fix

  • maven org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox 1.8.16, 2.0.12
  • libpdfbox-java Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1:1.8.16-1
  • libpdfbox2-java Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 2.0.12-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2018-11797

  • libpdfbox-java Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 1:1.8.16-2~18.04
  • libpdfbox2-java Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 2.0.13-2~18.04

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2018-11797

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • apache-pdfbox SLE Module for Development Tools 15 1.8.12-5.6.3
  • apache-pdfbox SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP3 1.8.12-3.5.4

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:3755-1SUSE-SU-2018:3318-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2018-11797 updated cvss 5.5

pdfbox: unbounded computation in parser resulting in a denial of service

  • Red Hat BPM Suite 6 pdfbox pdfbox Red Hat JBoss BRMS 6 pdfbox pdfbox Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization 6 pdfbox pdfbox Red Hat JBoss Fuse 6 pdfbox pdfbox Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works 6 pdfbox pdfbox
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Satellite 5 nutch
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Fuse 7.7.0
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2020:3192

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

3.50% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 89% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
maven org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox
>=1.8.0, <1.8.16
>=2.0.0, <2.0.12
1.8.16
2.0.12

Affected products

  • Apache Software Foundation Apache PDFBox

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.