pypdf has possible long runtimes for malformed startxref

Impact

An attacker who exploits this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to possibly long runtimes for invalid startxref entries. When rebuilding the cross-reference table, PDF files with lots of whitespace characters become problematic. Only the non-strict reading mode is affected.

Patches

This has been fixed in pypdf==6.6.0.

Workarounds

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter


# Instead of
reader = PdfReader("file.pdf")
# use the strict mode:
reader = PdfReader("file.pdf", strict=True)

# Instead of
writer = PdfWriter(clone_from="file.pdf")
# use an explicit strict reader:
writer = PdfWriter(clone_from=PdfReader("file.pdf", strict=True))

Resources

This issue has been fixed in #3594.