What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-16293

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-08-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

A null pointer dereference vulnerability in compose_group_nonknockout_nonblend_isolated_allmask_common() in base/gxblend.c of Artifex Software GhostScript v9.50 allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted PDF file. This is fixed in v9.51.

Affected products

• Artifex Ghostscript: before 9.52 — fixed in 9.52
• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
• Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Artifex Ghostscript 9.52. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=701795
• https://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=7870f4951bcc6a153f317e3439e14d0e929fd231
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00032.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202008-20
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4469-1/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4748
• https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=701795
• https://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=7870f4951bcc6a153f317e3439e14d0e929fd231
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00032.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202008-20
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4469-1/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4748

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