Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting babeldoc package, versions [,0.6.3)

BabelDOC is a Yet Another Document Translator

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data in the _load_data process. An attacker can execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the affected process by crafting a PDF that injects an absolute path into the CMap name, causing the application to deserialize a malicious pickle file from an attacker-controlled location. This is only exploitable if the attacker can place a .pickle.gz file at a predictable path on the local filesystem accessible to the victim process.

Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.

Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.

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