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Fencer Intel
medium 6.5

CVE-2018-20551 json

A reachable Object::getString assertion in Poppler 0.72.0 allows attackers to cause a denial of service due to construction of invalid rich…

published 7y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2018-13105

cvss
6.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.9%
EPSS 1.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 80%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A reachable Object::getString assertion in Poppler 0.72.0 allows attackers to cause a denial of service due to construction of invalid rich media annotation assets in the AnnotRichMedia class in Annot.c.

Patch / fix

  • poppler Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 0.71.0-4

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2018-20551

  • poppler Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 0.41.0-0ubuntu1.12
  • poppler Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 0.62.0-2ubuntu2.7

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2018-20551

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • poppler RHEL 8 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12
  • poppler-cpp RHEL 8 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12
  • poppler-qt5 RHEL 8 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12
  • poppler-glib RHEL 8 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12
  • poppler-utils RHEL 8 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12

red hat advisories RHSA-2019:2713

  • poppler SLES for SAP 15 SP1, SLES for SAP 15, SLES 15-LTSS +8 more 0.62.0-4.6.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2021:3854-1

  • poppler openSUSE Leap 15.3 0.62.0-4.6.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2021:3854-1

Is CVE-2018-20551 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

Check with Fencer

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2018-20551 updated cvss 3.3

poppler: reachable Object::getString assertion in AnnotRichMedia class in Annot.c

  • Red Hat CodeReady Linux Builder (v. 8) poppler-cpp 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12, poppler-qt5 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream (v. 8) poppler 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12, poppler-glib 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12, poppler-utils 0.66.0-11.el8_0.12
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2019:2713
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 poppler Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 poppler, poppler-qt, poppler-qt4, poppler-glib, poppler-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 poppler, poppler-qt, poppler-cpp, poppler-glib, poppler-demos, poppler-utils
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.94% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 80% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • gitlab.freedesktop.org https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/703 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.