CVE-2018-20481: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 6.5. EPSS: 3.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

XRef::getEntry in XRef.cc in Poppler 0.72.0 mishandles unallocated XRef entries, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference) via a crafted PDF document, when XRefEntry::setFlag in XRef.h is called from Parser::makeStream in Parser.cc.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 14.04 only; version 16.04 only; version 18.04 only; version 18.10 only
• Debian Debian Linux: version 8.0 only
• Freedesktop Poppler: version 0.72.0 only

Published 2018-12-26. Last modified 2026-06-17.