CVE-2025-27837

Critical

Published: 25 March 2025

Published

25 March 2025

Modified

01 April 2025

KEV Added

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Patch

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CVSS Score 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS Score 0.0018 38.6th percentile

Risk Priority 20 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

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 38.6th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SI-2 (Flaw Remediation) and AC-3 (Access Enforcement).

Threat & Defense at a Glance

What attackers do: exploitation maps to Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) and 1 other technique. What defenders deploy: see the NIST 800-53 controls recommended below.

Threat & Defense Details

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI

SI-2 Flaw Remediation good match

prevent

Directly remediates the path traversal flaw in Ghostscript by requiring timely patching to version 10.05.0 or later.

SI-10 Information Input Validation partial match

prevent

Validates inputs to Ghostscript to detect and block malformed paths with invalid UTF-8 characters that enable arbitrary file access.

AC-3 Access Enforcement partial match

prevent

Enforces access control policies to restrict Ghostscript processes from accessing arbitrary files outside authorized directories.

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI

T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application Initial Access

Adversaries may attempt to exploit a weakness in an Internet-facing host or system to initially access a network.

attack.mitre.org →

T1005 Data from Local System Collection

Adversaries may search local system sources, such as file systems, configuration files, local databases, virtual machine files, or process memory, to find files of interest and sensitive data prior to Exfiltration.

attack.mitre.org →

Why these techniques?

Path traversal vulnerability enables remote arbitrary file access on systems processing untrusted inputs, directly facilitating exploitation of public-facing applications (T1190) and data collection from the local file system (T1005).

Confidence: HIGH · MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v19.0

NVD Description

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.

Deeper analysisAI

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.