Updates released this week by Foxit Software for its Reader and PhantomPDF products patch over a dozen vulnerabilities discovered recently by several researchers.
The flaws affect the 7.3.4.311 and ealier Windows versions of Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF. The security holes and various stability issues have been fixed with the release of Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF 8.0.
The list of vulnerabilities includes out-of-bounds read, heap buffer overflow, stack buffer overflow, use-after-free, and uninitialized pointer issues that could have been exploited remotely to disclose sensitive information, crash the applications and execute arbitrary code.
The flaws were related to the processing of TIFF files, long GoToR strings, PDF files with messy code in image descriptions, stretched images in PDF files, and PDF files containing incorrect Bezier data. The vulnerabilities are only triggered if the attacker can convince the victim to open a malicious file or website.
According to Foxit Software, more than 400 million people use Reader to manage their PDF documents, which means cybercriminals could have plenty of victims to choose from if they develop exploits for these vulnerabilities.
The security holes were reported to the vendor by Ke Liu of Tencent’s Xuanwu LAB, AbdulAziz Hariri of Trend Micro, Rocco Calvi and Steven Seeley of Source Incite, Björn Ruytenberg and others. Many of the flaws were reported through the Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI).
Earlier this month, Foxit Software released an update for the Linux version of Reader to address security bugs that could have been exploited to crash the application.
The Windows versions of Reader and PhantomPDF were updated twice earlier this year. In January, the developer released version 7.3 to address ten flaws that could have been exploited for remote code execution or to crash the application. In March, the company resolved several issues that could have caused an application crash.
Related: Adobe Patches Flaws in Acrobat, Reader, Digital Editions
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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