Predictive Vulnerability Intelligence.

Product

  • Product
  • Pricing
  • Documentation

Company

  • About
  • Partnerships
  • Blog
  • Support

Legal

  • Terms
  • Privacy
  • Data Licensing

© 2026 FAUCET Technologies LLC. All rights reserved.

CVE-2016-7978

33
FAUCET Score

CVE-2016-7978 is a critical use-after-free vulnerability in Ghostscript 9.20, specifically related to a reference leak in .setdevice. This flaw allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code with high impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability, as indicated by its CVSS score of 9.8 (CRITICAL). While no public exploits, Metasploit modules, or Nuclei templates are available, and there's minimal community discussion, its high FAUCET Risk Score of 82/100 suggests significant potential danger.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
9.20CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:artifex:ghostscript:9.20:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 3.0

9.8CRITICAL

CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
HIGH
Integrity Impact
HIGH
Availability Impact
HIGH
Exploitability Score
3.9
Impact Score
5.9
CvssVersion
3.0

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
5.53%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
92.0%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-27
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0553 is in the 86th percentile among its peer group of 36,835 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.1 Reddit, 0.3 Bluesky, 0.3 Mastodon, and 2.4 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.3 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Patch Available

Vendor Patches (1)

redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: ghostscript-0:9.07-20.el7_3.1
View patch

Vendor Advisories (1)

redhatCVE-2016-7978Moderate

ghostscript: reference leak in .setdevice allows use-after-free and remote code execution

Sep 30, 2016

References

rhn.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2017-0013.html
bugs.ghostscript.com / show_bug.cgi
Issue TrackingPatch
security.gentoo.org / glsa/201702-31
debian.org / security/2016/dsa-3691
openwall.com / lists/oss-security/2016/10/05/15
Mailing ListPatchThird Party Advisory
securityfocus.com / bid/95336
Third Party AdvisoryVDB Entry