Jens Müller (Ruhr University Bochum), Dominik Noss (Ruhr University Bochum), Christian Mainka (Ruhr University Bochum), Vladislav Mladenov (Ruhr University Bochum), Jörg Schwenk (Ruhr University Bochum)

PDF is the de-facto standard for document exchange. It is common to open PDF files from potentially untrusted sources such as email attachments or downloaded from the Internet. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis of the capabilities of malicious PDF documents. Instead of focusing on implementation bugs, we abuse legitimate features of the PDF standard itself by systematically identifying dangerous paths in the PDF file structure. These dangerous paths lead to attacks that we categorize into four generic classes: (1) Denial-of-Service attacks affecting the host that processes the document. (2) Information disclosure attacks leaking personal data out of the victim’s computer. (3) Data manipulation on the victim’s system. (4) Code execution on the victim’s machine. An evaluation of 28 popular PDF processing applications shows that 26 of them are vulnerable at least one attack. Finally, we propose a methodology to protect against attacks based on PDF features systematically.

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Kai Jansen (Ruhr University Bochum), Liang Niu (New York University), Nian Xue (New York University), Ivan Martinovic (University of Oxford), Christina Pöpper (New York University Abu Dhabi)

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Qinhan Tan (Zhejiang University), Zhihua Zeng (Zhejiang University), Kai Bu (Zhejiang University), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University)

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Abdallah Dawoud (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Sven Bugiel (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

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