CVE-2018-16543

Description

It was discovered that the ghostscript gssetresolution and gsgetresolution procedures were available, although they have dangerous side effects. An attacker could possibly exploit this to bypass the -dSAFER protection and crash ghostscript or, possibly, execute arbitrary code in the ghostscript context via a specially crafted PostScript document.

Statement

CVE-2018-16543 requires the "device subclassing" feature to be present in ghostscript in order to exploit it and corrupt the interpreter's memory. This feature appeared in Ghostscript-9.18. Thus ghostscript 9.07, as shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and older are not affected : although the attacker has access to the gssetresolution and gsgetresolution operators, they can not use these to corrupt memory.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score7.37.8N/A
Attack VectorNetworkLocalN/A
Attack ComplexityLowLowN/A
Privileges RequiredNoneNoneN/A
User InteractionNoneRequiredN/A
ScopeUnchangedUnchangedN/A
ConfidentialityLowHighN/A
Integrity ImpactLowHighN/A
Availability ImpactLowHighN/A

Vector

Red Hat: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L

NVD: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Other

Technical Impact: Quality Degradation

Dead code that results from code that can never be executed is an indication of problems with the source code that needs to be fixed and is an indication of poor quality.

Other

Technical Impact: Reduce Maintainability

Frequently Asked Questions

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