Arbitrary Command Injection Affecting evince package, versions <42.3-0ubuntu3.2


Severity

Recommended
medium

Based on Ubuntu security rating.

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of Concept
EPSS
0.53% (41st percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UBUNTU2204-EVINCE-16781035
  • published23 May 2026
  • disclosed10 Jun 2026

Introduced: 23 May 2026

CVE-2026-46529  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-77  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-88  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-829  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Ubuntu:22.04 evince to version 42.3-0ubuntu3.2 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream evince package and not the evince package as distributed by Ubuntu. See How to fix? for Ubuntu:22.04 relevant fixed versions and status.

Atril Document Viewer is the default document reader of the MATE desktop environment for Linux. A single-click remote code execution vulnerability in versions prior to 1.26.3 and 1.28.4 allows an attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution as the user by tricking them into clicking a link inside a malicious PDF document. The PDF can be packaged as a polyglot file that is simultaneously a valid PDF and a valid ELF shared library, making the attack a single-file, single-click, configuration-independent RCE on stock atril installations. The root cause is shell/ev-application.c:ev_spawn, which builds a command line from attacker-controlled PDF link-destination fields without applying g_shell_quote. The cmdline is then handed to g_app_info_create_from_commandline, which shell-parses it back into argv — splitting any embedded --gtk-module=PATH into a separate argv element. GTK then dlopen()s the path during init, running any __attribute__((constructor)) it finds. Versions 1.26.3 and 1.28.4 contain a patch for the issue. This is the same defect class as CVE-2023-51698 (CBT --checkpoint-action injection in comics-document.c, fixed in 1.6.2) but in a different code path (shell/ev-application.c) that the original patch did not touch.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1