CVE-2020-35524

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2021-03-09 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in libtiff in the handling of TIFF images in libtiff's TIFF2PDF tool. A specially crafted TIFF file can lead to arbitrary code execution. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to confidentiality, integrity, as well as system availability.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 33
libtiff: before 4.2.0 — fixed in 4.2.0
NetApp ONTAP Select Deploy administration utility: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: libtiff 4.2.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1932044
https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/merge_requests/159
https://gitlab.com/rzkn/libtiff/-/commit/7be2e452ddcf6d7abca88f41d3761e6edab72b22
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/06/msg00023.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/BMHBYFMX3D5VGR6Y3RXTTH3Q4NF4E6IG/
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202104-06
https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210521-0009/
https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4869
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1932044
https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/merge_requests/159
https://gitlab.com/rzkn/libtiff/-/commit/7be2e452ddcf6d7abca88f41d3761e6edab72b22
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/06/msg00023.html

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