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Use After Free in poppler

CVE-2025-52885

  • poppler
  • sailfishos-mirror:poppler
Severity Medium
Score 6.1/10

Summary

Poppler is a library for rendering PDF files, and examining or modifying their structure. A Use-After-Free (write) vulnerability has been detected in versions of Poppler through 25.09.1 within the StructTreeRoot class. The issue arises from the use of raw pointers to elements of a `std::vector`, which can lead to dangling pointers when the vector is resized. The vulnerability stems from the way that refToParentMap stores references to `std::vector` elements using raw pointers. These pointers may become invalid when the vector is resized. This vulnerability is a common security problem involving the use of raw pointers to `std::vectors`. Internally, `std::vector `stores its elements in a dynamically allocated array. When the array reaches its capacity and a new element is added, the vector reallocates a larger block of memory and moves all the existing elements to the new location. At this point if any pointers to elements are stored before a resize occurs, they become dangling pointers once the reallocation happens. Version 25.10.0 contains a patch for the issue.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • NONE

CWE-416 - Use After Free

Use-after-free (UaF) vulnerability occurs when the application is using a pointer to memory that has been freed. Any attempt to read/write to a buffer after it is de-allocated allows memory corruption, sensitive information exposure, and can potentially lead to arbitrary code execution.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published