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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.8

CVE-2020-15900 json

A memory corruption issue was found in Artifex Ghostscript 9.50 and 9.52.

published 2020-07-28 6 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2020-7873

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
5.2%
EPSS 5.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 92%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A memory corruption issue was found in Artifex Ghostscript 9.50 and 9.52. Use of a non-standard PostScript operator can allow overriding of file access controls. The 'rsearch' calculation for the 'post' size resulted in a size that was too large, and could underflow to max uint32_t. This was fixed in commit 5d499272b95a6b890a1397e11d20937de000d31b.

Patch / fix

  • ghostscript Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 9.52.1~dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-15900

  • ghostscript Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 9.50~dfsg-5ubuntu4.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2020-15900

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

  • ghostscript SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES for SAP 12 SP4, SLES for SAP 12 SP3 +15 more 9.52-23.39.1
  • ghostscript SLES for SAP 15, SLES 15-LTSS, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP2 +3 more 9.52-3.32.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2020:2097-1SUSE-SU-2020:2095-1

  • ghostscript openSUSE Tumbleweed 9.54.0-2.2
  • ghostscript openSUSE Leap 15.2 9.52-lp152.2.4.1
  • ghostscript-mini openSUSE Leap 15.2 9.52-lp152.2.4.1
  • ghostscript openSUSE Leap 15.1 9.52-lp151.3.15.1
  • ghostscript-mini openSUSE Leap 15.1 9.52-lp151.3.15.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10783-1openSUSE-SU-2020:1146-1openSUSE-SU-2020:1142-1

  • ghostscript Alpine 3.11 9.50-r1
  • ghostscript Alpine 3.12 9.52-r1

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2020-15900

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

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-2020-15900 updated cvss 7.3

ghostscript: Memory Corruption in Ghostscript 9.52 (SAFER Sandbox Breakout)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 ghostscript Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 ghostscript, ghostscript-gtk Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 libgs, ghostscript, ghostscript-gtk, ghostscript-cups Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 libgs, ghostscript, ghostscript-x11, ghostscript-tools-fonts, ghostscript-tools-dvipdf, ghostscript-tools-printing
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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

5.19% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 92% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-191 Integer Underflow (Wrap or Wraparound)
  • CWE-787 Out-of-bounds Write

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.