pdfminer.six before 20251230 contains an insecure deserialization vulnerability in the CMap loading mechanism. The library uses Python pickle to deserialize CMap cache files without validation. An attacker with the ability to place a malicious pickle file in a location accessible to the application can trigger arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation when the file is loaded by a trusted process. This is caused by an incomplete patch to CVE-2025-64512.
pdfminer.six vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution via Crafted PDF Input
Pdfminer.six is a community maintained fork of the original PDFMiner, a tool for extracting information from PDF documents. Prior to version 20251107, pdfminer.six will execute arbitrary code from a malicious pickle file if provided with a malicious PDF file. The `CMapDB._load_data()` function in pdfminer.six uses `pickle.loads()` to deserialize pickle files. These pickle files are supposed to be part of the pdfminer.six distribution stored in the `cmap/` directory, but a malicious PDF can specify an alternative directory and filename as long as the filename ends in `.pickle.gz`. A malicious, zipped pickle file can then contain code which wil