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CVE-2025-52885: GHSL-2025-042: Poppler has Use-After-Free

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.1 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-10-10 · updated 2026-10-19
• Weakness: CWE-416

Description

Poppler ia a library for rendering PDF files, and examining or modifying their structure. A use-after-free (write) vulnerability has been detected in versions Poppler prior to 25.10.0 within the StructTreeRoot class. The issue arises from the use of raw pointers to elements of a `std::vector`, which can lead to dangling pointers when the vector is resized. The vulnerability stems from the way that refToParentMap stores references to `std::vector` elements using raw pointers. These pointers may become invalid when the vector is resized. This vulnerability is a common security problem involving the use of raw pointers to `std::vectors`. Internally, `std::vector `stores its elements in a dynamically allocated array. When the array reaches its capacity and a new element is added, the vector reallocates a larger block of memory and moves all the existing elements to the new location. At this point if any pointers to elements are stored before a resize occurs, they become dangling pointers once the reallocation happens. Version 25.10.0 contains a patch for the issue.

Affected products

• poppler: before 25.10.0

References

• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1884
• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1884#note_3114334
• https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2025-042_poppler/
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/10/13/2

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