Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') vulnerability in Apache PDFBox Examples.
This issue affects the
ExtractEmbeddedFiles example in Apache PDFBox: from 2.0.24 through 2.0.36, from 3.0.0 through 3.0.7.
Users are recommended to update to version 2.0.37 or 3.0.8 once
available. Until then, they should apply the fix provided in GitHub PR
427.
The ExtractEmbeddedFiles example contained a path traversal vulnerability (CWE-22) mentioned in CVE-2026-23907. However the change in the releases 2.0.36 and 3.0.7 is flawed because it doesn't consider the file path separator. Because of that, a user having writing rights on /home/ABC could be victim to a malicious PDF resulting in a write attempt to any path starting with /home/ABC, e.g. "/home/ABCDEF".
Users who have copied this example into their production code should apply the mentioned change. The example
has been changed accordingly and is available in the project repository.
CVSS Score
4.3
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2026-04-14
This issue affects the
ExtractEmbeddedFiles example in Apache PDFBox: from 2.0.24 through 2.0.35, from 3.0.0 through 3.0.6.
The ExtractEmbeddedFiles example contains a path traversal vulnerability (CWE-22) because
the filename that is obtained from
PDComplexFileSpecification.getFilename() is appended to the extraction path.
Users who have copied this example into their production code should
review it to ensure that the extraction path is acceptable. The example
has been changed accordingly, now the initial path and the extraction
paths are converted into canonical paths and it is verified that
extraction path contains the initial path. The documentation has also
been adjusted.
CVSS Score
5.3
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2026-03-10