Impact
An attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to an infinite loop.
This infinite loop blocks the current process and can utilize a single core of the CPU by 100%. It does not affect memory usage. That is, for example, the case if the user extracted metadata from such a malformed PDF.
Patches
The issue was fixed with #1331
Workarounds
If you cannot update your version of PyPDF2 (preferably to pypdf>3.1.0 as PyPDF2 is deprecated), you should modify PyPDF2/generic/_data_structures.py::read_object.
Replace:
else:
# number object OR indirect reference
peek = stream.read(20)
stream.seek(-len(peek), 1) # reset to start
if IndirectPattern.match(peek) is not None:
return IndirectObject.read_from_stream(stream, pdf)
else:
return NumberObject.read_from_stream(stream)by
elif tok in b"0123456789+-.":
# number object OR indirect reference
peek = stream.read(20)
stream.seek(-len(peek), 1) # reset to start
if IndirectPattern.match(peek) is not None:
return IndirectObject.read_from_stream(stream, pdf)
else:
return NumberObject.read_from_stream(stream)
else:
raise PdfReadError(
f"Invalid Elementary Object starting with {tok} @{stream.tell()}"
)References
MartinThoma Reporter
Impact
An attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to an infinite loop.
This infinite loop blocks the current process and can utilize a single core of the CPU by 100%. It does not affect memory usage. That is, for example, the case if the user extracted metadata from such a malformed PDF.
Patches
The issue was fixed with #1331
Workarounds
If you cannot update your version of
PyPDF2(preferably topypdf>3.1.0as PyPDF2 is deprecated), you should modifyPyPDF2/generic/_data_structures.py::read_object.Replace:
by
References