Talos experts shared details of a remote code execution flaw in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC

Security experts at Cisco Talos disclosed details of a remote code execution flaw that affects Adobe Acrobat Reader DC versions 2018.009.20050 and 2017.011.30070 and earlier.

Security experts at Cisco Talos shared details of a remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-4901, that affects Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.

A remote attacker can exploit the vulnerability tricking the victim into opening a malicious file or visiting a specially crafted webpage.

The flaw affects Adobe Acrobat Reader versions 2018.009.20050 and 2017.011.30070 and earlier. The vulnerability was disclosed on Dec. 7 and Adobe addressed it a few days ago, on February 13.

“Adobe Acrobat Reader is the most popular and most feature-rich PDF reader. It has a big user base, is usually a default PDF reader on systems and integrates into web browsers as a plugin for rendering PDFs. As such, tricking a user into visiting a malicious web page or sending a specially crafted email attachment can be enough to trigger this vulnerability.” reads the analysis published by the Talos team.

Adobe classified the flaw with a “priority 2” level that equals to “important”, this means that there is an “elevated risk” of exploitation. The good news is that there are currently no known exploits in the wild.

The researchers explained that the flaw could be used by attackers to embed a malicious JavaScript code in a PDF file to use document ID to perform unauthorized operations to trigger a stack-based buffer overflow when opening a specially crafted PDF document.

“A specific Javascript script embedded in a PDF file can cause the document ID field to be used in an unbounded copy operation leading to stack-based buffer overflow when opening a specially crafted PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Reader,” continues Talos.

Researchers at Talos also released Snort rules 45102-3 that could be used by administrators to detect exploitation attempts.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, CVE-2018-4901)

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