high · 7.5 Patched

lopdf has a stack overflow via deeply nested PDF objects

GHSA-6fj4-rcr3-r7rr · RUSTSEC-2026-0187 · published 21 Jun 2026

How serious is it

  • Severity: high, CVSS score 7.5 out of 10.
  • No exploit prediction (EPSS) score yet.
  • Not on the CISA list of exploited vulnerabilities.
  • No public exploit in Exploit-DB.

Is your app affected by GHSA-6fj4-rcr3-r7rr?

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Who is affected

  • lopdf (crates.io) < 0.42.0

How to check

  1. Run cargo tree -i lopdf in your project to see the installed version, including copies pulled in by other packages.
  2. Or paste your lockfile into the checker: it lists every package with a known vulnerability, this one included.

How to fix

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  1. Upgrade lopdf to 0.42.0 or later, commit the lockfile and redeploy.
  2. If a vulnerable version was live, check your logs and rotate the secrets that server could read.

The advisory

`lopdf::Document::load_mem` (and the other `load*` entry points) parses nested PDF arrays and dictionaries with unbounded recursion. A small crafted PDF whose Catalog contains a deeply nested array (`/X [[[ … ]]]`, on the order of 10,000 levels) exhausts the call stack and aborts the process with `SIGABRT`. Because this is a stack-overflow abort rather than a `panic!`, it cannot be caught with `catch_unwind`: any service that parses untrusted PDF input with lopdf can be crashed by a ~21 KB file, resulting in a denial of service. Confirmed on lopdf 0.41.0 and earlier; fixed in 0.42.0. Default configuration, no features changed. ## Proof of concept ```rust fn main() { let bytes = std::fs::read("poc.pdf").unwrap(); // ~10,380-deep nested array in the Catalog let _ = lopdf::Document::load_mem(&bytes); // stack overflow -> SIGABRT } ``` An equivalent PoC is a minimal PDF whose Catalog `/X` value is `"[" * 10380 + "]" * 10380`. ## Suggested fix Enforce a maximum object-nesting depth in the parser and return an `Err` instead of recursing without bound.

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References

Merged from GitHub Advisory Database, OSV. Last updated 23 Oct 2026. All vulnerabilities · RSS · JSON