Software Engineering Institute

According to Foolabs: Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities. Foolabs Xpdf contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by the t1lib library incorrectly parsing Type 1 fonts. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.

A remote attacker can cause the device to crash and may be able to execute arbitrary code.

The vendor has stated they will stop using t1lib in their product and users should build Xpdf without t1lib.

To build Xpdf without t1lib, add the "--with-t1-library=no" flag to the
configure command:

./configure --with-t1-library=no .....

To double-check, run "xpdf --help". The "-freetype" option should be
listed, and the "-t1lib" option should NOT be listed. That indicates
that Xpdf was built with FreeType and without t1lib.

With this setting, Xpdf will use FreeType instead of t1lib to rasterize
Type 1 fonts. With recent versions of FreeType, the Type 1 quality is
as good or better than t1lib, so this should not present any problems.