CVE-2025-20260 - Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Severity

98%

Complexity

39%

Confidentiality

98%

A vulnerability in the PDF scanning processes of ClamAV could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a buffer overflow condition, cause a denial of service (DoS) condition, or execute arbitrary code on an affected device. This vulnerability exists because memory buffers are allocated incorrectly when PDF files are processed. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted PDF file to be scanned by ClamAV on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a buffer overflow, likely resulting in the termination of the ClamAV scanning process and a DoS condition on the affected software. Although unproven, there is also a possibility that an attacker could leverage the buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the ClamAV process.

CVSS 3.1 Base Score 9.8. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).

Demo Examples

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

CWE-122

While buffer overflow examples can be rather complex, it is possible to have very simple, yet still exploitable, heap-based buffer overflows:


               
}
strcpy(buf, argv[1]);

The buffer is allocated heap memory with a fixed size, but there is no guarantee the string in argv[1] will not exceed this size and cause an overflow.

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

CWE-122

This example applies an encoding procedure to an input string and stores it into a buffer.


               
}
return dst_buf;
die("user string too long, die evil hacker!");
else dst_buf[dst_index++] = user_supplied_string[i];
dst_buf[dst_index++] = ';';
/* encode to < */

The programmer attempts to encode the ampersand character in the user-controlled string, however the length of the string is validated before the encoding procedure is applied. Furthermore, the programmer assumes encoding expansion will only expand a given character by a factor of 4, while the encoding of the ampersand expands by 5. As a result, when the encoding procedure expands the string it is possible to overflow the destination buffer if the attacker provides a string of many ampersands.

Overview

First reported 2 months ago

2025-06-18 18:15:00

Last updated 1 week ago

2025-08-11 18:19:00

Affected Software

ClamAV

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