Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HSummary
CVE-2025-27837 is a critical-severity Path Traversal (CWE-22) vulnerability in Artifex Ghostscript. Its CVSS base score is 9.8 (Critical).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190); ranked at the 45th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-3 (Access Enforcement) and SI-10 (Information Input Validation) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
Deeper analysis AI-assisted summary
Synthesised by an AI model from the NVD description and linked references — a reading aid, not an authoritative source.
CVE-2025-27837 is a path traversal vulnerability (CWE-22) discovered in Artifex Ghostscript versions before 10.05.0. The flaw resides in the base/gp_mswin.c and base/winrtsup.cpp components, where a truncated path containing invalid UTF-8 characters enables access to arbitrary files.
Attackers can exploit this vulnerability remotely over the network (AV:N) with low attack complexity (AC:L), requiring no privileges (PR:N) or user interaction (UI:N), and without changing scope (S:U). Achieving a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.8, exploitation results in high impacts on confidentiality, integrity, and availability (C:H/I:H/A:H), allowing unauthorized access to arbitrary files on affected Windows systems processing malicious inputs.
The Ghostscript bug tracker at https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708238 documents the issue, with mitigation achieved by upgrading to Ghostscript 10.05.0 or later.
OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-8086
Vulnerability Data
An issue was discovered in Artifex Ghostscript before 10.05.0. Access to arbitrary files can occur through a truncated path with invalid UTF-8 characters, for base/gp_mswin.c and base/winrtsup.cpp.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Control response
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V5.3.2
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Enforces the intended directory access authorizations that path traversal would otherwise bypass.
Input validation directly neutralizes special path elements before pathname construction occurs.
Least privilege reduces the impact of any unauthorized file access obtained via traversal.
Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Patching/maintenance can remediate known path-traversal flaws in deployed software (partial prevention of exploitability) but does nothing to stop the coding defect from being introduced in the first place.
PR.AA-05 defines and reviews access policies but does not address code-level pathname neutralization, so neither direction prevents CWE-22.
Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Security testing in development catches path traversal via static/dynamic analysis.
Secure SDLC mandates input validation and path sanitization that directly prevent path traversal.
Application security requirements include rules for safe file handling and canonicalization.
Secure architecture principles require least-privilege file access and directory isolation.
Secure coding standards explicitly forbid unsafe path construction and mandate safe APIs.
Information access restriction limits which files an application may read or write.