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Message-ID: <f9537d1f-b9f8-4cfe-8ace-a303a2a27a01@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 22 May 2026 18:48:37 +0200
From: Wolfgang <raveit65.sun@...il.com>
To: Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro@...me.org>, oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Evince/Atril/Xreader command injection CVE-2026-46529
Hi,
thanks for inform me about the CVE. Atril is updated to 1.18.5 in fedora
which should solve the issue.
Wolfgang
Am 21.05.26 um 15:34 schrieb Michael Catanzaro:
> Hello,
>
> The full reports for this vulnerability are available now:
>
> Atril:
> https://github.com/mate-desktop/atril/security/advisories/GHSA-vgv2-m826-8f6f
> Evince: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/work_items/2153
>
> They contain a script for building malicious polyglot PDFs that are
> simultaneously both valid PDF files and also valid ELF binaries. When
> the user opens the PDF in the PDF viewer and clicks on a malicious
> link embedded in the PDF, the PDF abuses the command injection
> vulnerability to load itself as a GTK module using the `--gtk-module`
> command line flag. It can then execute arbitrary code via its library
> constructor. That flag was removed in GTK 4, which is why the
> vulnerability is much less serious for Papers than it is for Evince,
> Atril, and Xreader.
>
> The provided script requires that the attacker predict the absolute
> path that the malicious PDF file will be saved to, generally
> /home/username/Downloads/attacker_chosen_name.pdf. However, in a
> follow-up comment on the Atril advisory, the reporter says that it's
> possible to modify the script to avoid the requirement to predict the
> file path.
>
> My takeaway from this incident: AI tools are going to find a lot of
> vulnerabilities in the short term. A human inspecting this code should
> have been able to find the command injection vulnerability, but that
> requires time and effort, so nobody did. Running an AI and telling it
> to inspect the code is much easier. We're probably in for a rough time
> in the short term. But in the long term, we are going to be much more
> secure than we were before, so this is good.
>
> Also, the AI is able to take an investigation much farther than a
> human would be willing to, crafting a creative working exploit when a
> human would have almost certainly just stopped after finding the
> vulnerability. This is unusual and dangerous, but the silver lining is
> it helps us appreciate the severity of the issue. It's often hard to
> assess how bad a vulnerability is. If not for the weaponized exploit,
> I would have thought this bug was not very scary and treated it as not
> a big deal. But the AI was clever and found a way to make it extremely
> scary! I don't know how much prompting the human reporter had to do to
> get this result.
>
> Michael
>
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