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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.3

CVE-2023-38745 json

Pandoc before 3.1.6 allows arbitrary file write: this can be triggered by providing a crafted image element in the input when generating fi…

published 2023-07-25 3 y ago modified 2026-07-18 3 mo ago also EUVD-2023-42520 , JLSEC-2026-500

cvss
6.3
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 16%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Pandoc before 3.1.6 allows arbitrary file write: this can be triggered by providing a crafted image element in the input when generating files via the --extract-media option or outputting to PDF format. This allows an attacker to create or overwrite arbitrary files, depending on the privileges of the process running Pandoc. It only affects systems that pass untrusted user input to Pandoc and allow Pandoc to be used to produce a PDF or with the --extract-media option. NOTE: this issue exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2023-35936 (failure to properly account for double encoded path names).

Patch / fix

  • julia pandoc_jll 3.1.9+0
  • pandoc pandoc 3.1.6

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-2023-38745 updated cvss 5.0

pandoc: allows attacker to create or overwrite arbitrary files on the system (incomplete fix in upstream for CVE-2023-35936)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 pandoc, pandoc-common
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.25% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 16% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 6.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
OSV 3.1 6.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
julia pandoc_jll
<3.1.9+0
3.1.9+0

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.