CVE-2016-9601

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-04-24 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-190

Description

ghostscript before version 9.21 is vulnerable to a heap based buffer overflow that was found in the ghostscript jbig2_decode_gray_scale_image function which is used to decode halftone segments in a JBIG2 image. A document (PostScript or PDF) with an embedded, specially crafted, jbig2 image could trigger a segmentation fault in ghostscript.

Affected products

Artifex Gpl Ghostscript: before 9.21 — fixed in 9.21
Artifex Jbig2Dec: through 0.13
Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Artifex Gpl Ghostscript 9.21. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=jbig2dec.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=e698d5c11d27212aa1098bc5b1673a3378563092
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/97095
https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697457
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2016-9601
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201706-24
https://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3817
http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=jbig2dec.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=e698d5c11d27212aa1098bc5b1673a3378563092
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/97095
https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697457
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2016-9601
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201706-24
https://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3817

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