Security issue reported in lopdf
lopdf::Document::loadmem (and the other load entry points) parses nested PDF arrays and dictionaries with unbounded recursion.
What happened
- lopdf has a stack overflow via deeply nested PDF objectsSecurity Advisory GHSA-6fj4-rcr3-r7rr
- lopdf::Document::loadmem (and the other load entry points) parses nested PDF arrays and dictionaries with unbounded recursion. A small crafted PDF whose Catalog contains a deeply nested array (/X [[[ … ]]], on the order of 10,000 levels) exhausts the call stack and aborts the process with SIGABRT.Advisory description (GHSA-6fj4-rcr3-r7rr)
Contributing factors stated by the source
- lopdf::Document::loadmem (and the other load entry points) parses nested PDF arrays and dictionaries with unbounded recursion. A small crafted PDF whose Catalog contains a deeply nested array (/X [[[ … ]]], on the order of 10,000 levels) exhausts the call stack and aborts the process with SIGABRT.
The failure pattern
Watch the pattern: Retry amplification and runaway resource consumption
Related standards
CollectSEA's mapping through this incident's failure pattern; not an official determination by the standards bodies.
Building something similar?
Describe your design and see every precedent that applies, with safeguards you can hand to your coding agent.
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Design reference: AWS guidance on timeouts, retries and backoff with jitter
AWS describes retries as powerful but dangerous: when a dependency is struggling, too many retries can amplify load and turn a partial failure into a retry storm.
Software component issue could make the service unavailable
A public security advisory describes this issue. Review the linked source for the technical details and remediation guidance.
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A public security advisory describes this issue. Review the linked source for the technical details and remediation guidance.
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