What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-14811

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2019-09-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-648

Description

A flaw was found in, ghostscript versions prior to 9.50, in the .pdf_hook_DSC_Creator procedure where it did not properly secure its privileged calls, enabling scripts to bypass `-dSAFER` restrictions. A specially crafted PostScript file could disable security protection and then have access to the file system, or execute arbitrary commands.

Affected products

• Artifex Ghostscript: before 9.50 — fixed in 9.50
• Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 29, 30, 31
• openSUSE Leap: 15.0, 15.1
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 3.11, 4.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Artifex Ghostscript 9.50. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-09/msg00088.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-09/msg00090.html
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2019:2824
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2594
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2019-14811
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/09/msg00007.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/6AATIHU32MYKUOXQDJQU4X4DDVL7NAY3/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LBUC4DBBJTRFNCR3IODBV4IXB2C2HI3V/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/ZP34D27RKYV2POJ3NJLSVCHUA5V5C45A/
• https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Sep/15
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202004-03
• https://www.debian.org/security/2019/dsa-4518

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