Researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in the widely deployed Ghostscript package that allows bad actors to remotely take control of vulnerable systems. There's no current patch available for the multiple flaws discovered.
Ghostscript is a suite of tools used by hundreds of software suites and coding libraries, which allows desktop software and web servers to handle Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF page description languages.
Multiple bypass vulnerabilities, disclosed Tuesday, exist in the suite's optional -dSAFER feature, which is ironically supposed to prevent unsafe PostScript operations. By causing Ghostscript (or a program leveraging Ghostscript) to parse a specially-crafted malicious file, a remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the Ghostscript code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:40AM (2 children)
If I use Gmail to open/preview a pdf, I believe Google uses some version of Ghostscript in their viewer, can anyone confirm? For sure I know they are not using Adobe Acrobat Reader because on certain pdf's Google's viewer fails to render properly...and I have to download the file and open locally in Reader to see everything correctly.
Anyone know where the Google viewer runs? My guess is it runs on a Google server, so this newly discovered exploit should not get to my machine. But with the amount of crap that comes in when loading Gmail, maybe it actually runs locally??
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:10PM (1 child)
Without checking, 99.99% it's client-side PDF.js [github.io].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @10:59PM
According to the Chromium credit page, they have used PDFium since 2014. Also, PDF.js is a Mozilla project.