CVE-2025-52886 is a use-after-free vulnerability in poppler, caused by a reference count overflow. Reference counting was done with a 32-bit counter, which meant it was feasible to overflow the counter. In my testing, it took approximately 12 hours to overflow the counter though, so the risk of exploitation was low.
This directory contains the code for building the proof-of-concept. To run it:
make
./pdfgen > poc.pdfNotice that the size of the generated PDF is only 3104 bytes. Now try
to either open the PDF or run a command line application like
pdftohtml on it.
