PDF has become the de-facto standard for formatting print documents. Over the years, it has evolved into a feature rich and very complex system. PDF supports embedded Javascript that can be used for form validation and contains support for different image formats and 3D models, etc. As a result, PDF implementations have numerous vulnerabilities that can be exploit by adversaries to gain control over a user’s computer. Here are a number of CVEs that are currently being exploited in the wild: CVE-2007-5659, CVE-2008-2992, CVE-2009-0927, CVE-2009-2994, CVE-2009-4324, CVE-2010-0188.
In this blog post, we are going to look at current exploitation of CVE-2010-0188: An integer overflow in the parsing of the dot range option in TIFF files. The vulnerability was publicly announced in February 2010. Examples of exploit code are readily available on the Internet and a very good explanation of how the exploit works has been provided by Fortinet.
The exploit described by Fortinet utilizes an AcroForm described in XML. The XML contains an image field with an embedded TIFF image that triggers the vulnerability.
