aggressive memory leak in kpdf while opening an illegal(?) PDF

[Pekka Jääskeläinen]

Binary package hint: kpdf

When I try to open the PDF at following URL with kpdf:

kpdf http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/rd/20035612%2C32969%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/1803/http:zSzzSzdavinci.snu.ac.krzSzlinkszSzilpzSztullsen95.pdf/tullsen95simultaneous.pdf

I get an aggressive memory leak consuming all the memory and converting system unusable for a while.

Notabe is that opening the same PDF with xpdf produces a crash after scrolling down couple of pages. I'll report that bug separately.

With Acroread the PDF displays fine.

One could view this bug as a potential security vulnerability as it causes a DoS for a while, and potentially triggers the OOM killer.

[Pekka Jääskeläinen (pekka-jaaskelainen)]

Attached the PDF to bug #111278 with Xpdf backtrace.

[Kees Cook (kees)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I have unmarked it as a security issue since this bug does not show evidence of allowing attackers to cross privilege boundaries nor directly cause loss of data/privacy. Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find.

[Kees Cook (kees)]

I see similar behavior when loading the PDF in evince. (100% CPU and doing seemingly endless alloc/free cycles of all available memory.)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could be a duplicate of bug #70428

[TerryG (tgalati4)]

Marking as Confirmed since this has been moved to poppler. Definitely locks up evince 2.20.1 with poppler 0.6.2 under gutsy. A bad actor for only 12 pages.
Acroread 8 seems to open it OK.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Closing for kdegraphics since it is working fine in Okular (KDE 4 replacement of KPDF).

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

still an issue with Intrepid?

[Pekka Jääskeläinen (pekka-jaaskelainen)]

I do not have Intrepid installation, but the PDF does not crash KPDF anymore in Hardy. However, one of the pages is not rendered fully, but the topic of this bug is not reproducible anymore at least for me.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

If it works with Okular that means it's been fixed with poppler too.