CVE-2020-12801: Crash-recovered MSOffice encrypted documents defaulted to not to using encryption on next save

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-05-18 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-311

Description

If LibreOffice has an encrypted document open and crashes, that document is auto-saved encrypted. On restart, LibreOffice offers to restore the document and prompts for the password to decrypt it. If the recovery is successful, and if the file format of the recovered document was not LibreOffice's default ODF file format, then affected versions of LibreOffice default that subsequent saves of the document are unencrypted. This may lead to a user accidentally saving a MSOffice file format document unencrypted while believing it to be encrypted. This issue affects: LibreOffice 6-3 series versions prior to 6.3.6; 6-4 series versions prior to 6.4.3.

Affected products

The Document Foundation LibreOffice: from 6.3.0 before 6.3.6; from 6.4.0 before 6.4.3 — fixed in 6.3.6, 6.4.3
openSUSE Leap: 15.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: The Document Foundation LibreOffice 6.3.6, 6.4.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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