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CVE-2018-20481

23
FAUCET Score

CVE-2018-20481 is a denial-of-service vulnerability affecting Poppler 0.72.0 and various Linux distributions, including Canonical, Debian, and Freedesktop versions. It stems from improper handling of unallocated XRef entries in crafted PDF documents, leading to a NULL pointer dereference. With a CVSS score of 6.5 (Medium), this vulnerability can be triggered remotely with low attack complexity, requiring user interaction to open a malicious PDF, and resulting in high availability impact. There is no evidence of active exploitation, public exploit code, or significant community discussion surrounding this CVE.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
0.72.0CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:freedesktop:poppler:0.72.0:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
14.04CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:14.04:*:*:*:lts:*:*:*
16.04CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:16.04:*:*:*:lts:*:*:*
18.04CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:*:*:*:lts:*:*:*
18.10CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.10:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 3.0

6.5MEDIUM

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

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
REQUIRED
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
NONE
Integrity Impact
NONE
Availability Impact
HIGH
Exploitability Score
2.8
Impact Score
3.6
CvssVersion
3.0

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
3.42%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
87.7%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-27
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0342 is in the 94th percentile among its peer group of 26,234 CVEs.

Social Chatter

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

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.1 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Patch Available

Vendor Patches (6)

redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: evince-0:3.28.2-8.el7
View patch
redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: okular-0:4.10.5-7.el7
View patch
redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: poppler-0:0.26.5-38.el7
View patch
redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Fixed in: poppler-0:0.66.0-11.el8_0.12
View patch
redhatend of lifevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Fixed in: poppler
redhatend of lifevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Fixed in: poppler

Vendor Advisories (1)

redhatCVE-2018-20481Low

poppler: NULL pointer dereference in the XRef::getEntry in XRef.cc

Dec 20, 2018

References

access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2019:2022
access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2019:2713
gitlab.freedesktop.org / poppler/poppler/issues/692
ExploitIssue TrackingVendor Advisory
gitlab.freedesktop.org / poppler/poppler/merge_requests/143
PatchVendor Advisory
lists.debian.org / debian-lts-announce/2019/03/msg00008.html
Third Party Advisory
lists.debian.org / debian-lts-announce/2020/07/msg00018.html
usn.ubuntu.com / 3865-1
Third Party Advisory
securityfocus.com / bid/106321
Third Party AdvisoryVDB Entry