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Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2017-12595 json

The tokenizer in QPDF 6.0.0 and 7.0.b1 is recursive for arrays and dictionaries, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service…

published 2017-08-27 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-4166

cvss
7.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.8%
EPSS 1.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 78%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The tokenizer in QPDF 6.0.0 and 7.0.b1 is recursive for arrays and dictionaries, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (stack consumption and segmentation fault) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a PDF document with a deep data structure, as demonstrated by a crash in QPDFObjectHandle::parseInternal in libqpdf/QPDFObjectHandle.cc.

Patch / fix

  • qpdf Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 7.0.0-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-12595

  • qpdf Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 8.0.2-3~14.04.1
  • qpdf Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 8.0.2-3~16.04.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2017-12595

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

  • qpdf SLES 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP2-BCL, SLED 12 SP3 +9 more 7.1.1-3.3.4
  • cups-filters SLES 12 SP2-BCL, OpenStack Cloud 7, Enterprise Storage 4 +5 more 1.0.58-15.2.1
  • cups-filters SLES for SAP 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP3, SLED 12 SP3 1.0.58-19.2.3

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:3066-2SUSE-SU-2018:3066-1

  • qpdf openSUSE Tumbleweed 10.3.2-1.3

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11289-1

  • qpdf Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +14 more 7.0.0-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2017-12595

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-2017-12595 updated cvss 3.3

qpdf: Stack overflow when processing deeply nested arrays and dictionaries

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 qpdf, qpdf-libs
    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

Exploit prediction

1.80% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 78% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

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.