pypdf is a free and open-source pure-python PDF library. Prior to 6.15.0, an attacker can craft a PDF that causes long runtimes when the pypdf/utils.py function readuntilwhitespace reads a stream containing a long run of bytes without whitespace. The function repeatedly performs immutable bytes concatenation in a one-byte loop, causing quadratic processing cost for the long non-whitespace input. This issue is fixed in version 6.15.0.

Impact

An attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to large memory consumption. This requires parsing the /ToUnicode entry of a font with unusually large values, for example during text extraction.

Patches

This has been fixed in pypdf==6.15.0.

Workarounds

If you cannot upgrade yet, consider applying the changes from PR #3944.

Impact

An attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to an infinite loop. This requires parsing the content stream of a page with a not terminated inline image, as done when extracting the page text for example.

Patches

This has been fixed in pypdf==6.14.1.

Workarounds

If you cannot upgrade yet, consider applying the changes from PR #3891.

Impact An attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to an infinite loop. This infinite loop blocks the current process and can utilize a single core of the CPU by 100%. It does not affect memory usage.

That is, for example, the case when the pypdf-user manipulates an incoming malicious PDF e.g. by merging it with another PDF or by adding annotations.

Patches The issue was fixed with #2264

Workarounds If you cannot update your version of pypdf, you should modify pypdf/generic/datastructures.py just like #2264 did.