Vulnerability Note VU#31554

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

Original Release date: 02 Nov 2000 | Last revised: 12 Dec 2000

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.

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.

Impact

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

Solution

Apply a patch

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

Systems Affected (Learn More)

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
AdobeAffected-02 Nov 2000
If you are a vendor and your product is affected, let us know.

CVSS Metrics (Learn More)

Group Score Vector
Base N/A N/A
Temporal N/A N/A
Environmental N/A N/A

References

Credit

This document was written by Cory F Cohen.

Other Information

  • CVE IDs: CAN-2000-0713
  • Date Public: 03 Aug 2000
  • Date First Published: 02 Nov 2000
  • Date Last Updated: 12 Dec 2000
  • Severity Metric: 5.00
  • Document Revision: 8

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