Vulnerability Note VU#31554

Adobe Acrobat products have buffer overflow in the CIDFont /Registry and /Ordering entries

Overview

By embedding malicious code in a Portable Document Format (PDF) file, an attacker can cause arbitrary code to execute on the victim's system.

I. Description

The Adobe Acrobat PDF file format facility for specifying fonts contains buffer overflows in the /Registry and /Ordering entries. Each of these entries are not properly bounds checked, allowing at attacker to construct a malicious document which overflows an internal buffer and allows the execution of arbitary code.

These entries are in the CIDSystemInfo dictionary. CID stands for "character identifier". The /Registry entry is for specifying which organization issued the character collection. For example "Adobe". The /Ordering entry is supposed to uniquely identify a character collection issued by the registry. An example could be "Japan1". More information about the PDF document format is available in the "Portable Document Format Reference Manual" from Adobe.

II. Impact

An attacker could execute arbitrary code on systems running a vulnerable Adobe product when the user views a malicious PDF file.

III. Solution

Apply a patch

Adobe released Version 4.05 Update 2, which corrects this problem:

http://www.adobe.com/misc/pdfsecurity.html

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Updated
Adobe	Vulnerable	2-Nov-2000

References

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/1509
http://www.adobe.com/misc/pdfsecurity.html

Credit

This document was written by Cory F Cohen.

Other Information

Date Public	08/03/2000
Date First Published	11/02/2000 05:12:07 PM
Date Last Updated	12/12/2000
CERT Advisory
CVE Name	CAN-2000-0713
Metric	5.00
Document Revision	8

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.