Cyber Resilience

CVE-2020-36773

Critical

Published: 04 February 2024

Published
04 February 2024
Modified
22 May 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0011 28.2th percentile
Risk Priority 20 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2020-36773 is a critical-severity Use After Free (CWE-416) vulnerability in Artifex Ghostscript. Its CVSS base score is 9.8 (Critical).

Operationally, ranked at the 28.2th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Artifex Ghostscript before 9.53.0 has an out-of-bounds write and use-after-free in devices/vector/gdevtxtw.c (for txtwrite) because a single character code in a PDF document can map to more than one Unicode code point (e.g., for a ligature).

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

artifex
ghostscript
9.51, 9.52, 9.52.1, 9.53.0

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-416 CWE-787

Use-after-free exploits that achieve arbitrary code execution are blocked or significantly hardened by non-executable pages and ASLR.

References