CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-21088

Use After Free

Published: Sep 06, 2023 | Modified: Sep 12, 2023
CVSS 3.x
7.8
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Acrobat Reader DC versions versions 2020.013.20074 (and earlier), 2020.001.30018 (and earlier) and 2017.011.30188 (and earlier) are affected by a Use After Free vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker could leverage this vulnerability to achieve arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. Exploitation of this issue requires user interaction in that a victim must open a malicious file.

Weakness

Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Acrobat Adobe 17.011.30180 (including) 17.011.30190 (excluding)
Acrobat Adobe 20.001.30005 (including) 20.001.30020 (excluding)
Acrobat_dc Adobe 15.007.20033 (including) 21.001.20135 (excluding)
Acrobat_reader Adobe 17.011.30180 (including) 17.011.30190 (excluding)
Acrobat_reader Adobe 20.001.30005 (including) 20.001.30020 (excluding)
Acrobat_reader_dc Adobe 15.007.20033 (including) 21.001.20135 (excluding)

Extended Description

The use of previously-freed memory can have any number of adverse consequences, ranging from the corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code, depending on the instantiation and timing of the flaw. The simplest way data corruption may occur involves the system’s reuse of the freed memory. Use-after-free errors have two common and sometimes overlapping causes:

In this scenario, the memory in question is allocated to another pointer validly at some point after it has been freed. The original pointer to the freed memory is used again and points to somewhere within the new allocation. As the data is changed, it corrupts the validly used memory; this induces undefined behavior in the process. If the newly allocated data happens to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved.

Potential Mitigations

References