CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-39837

Use After Free

Published: Sep 29, 2021 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
N/A
Source:
NVD
CVSS 2.x
6.8 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Acrobat Reader DC versions 2021.005.20060 (and earlier), 2020.004.30006 (and earlier) and 2017.011.30199 (and earlier) are affected by a use-after-free vulnerability in the processing of the AcroForm deleteItemAt action that could result in 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 20.001.30005 (including) 20.004.30006 (including)
Acrobat_reader Adobe 20.001.30005 (including) 20.004.30006 (including)

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