Cyber Resilience

CVE-2025-4638

Critical

Published: 14 May 2025

Published
14 May 2025
Modified
21 October 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v4 9.2 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:L/SA:H/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:Y/R:U/V:D/RE:M/U:Amber
EPSS Score 0.0039 60.6th percentile
Risk Priority 19 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2025-4638 is a critical-severity Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer (CWE-119) vulnerability in Pointclouds Point Cloud Library. Its CVSS base score is 9.2 (Critical).

Operationally, ranked in the top 39.4% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

A vulnerability exists in the inftrees.c component of the zlib library, which is bundled within the PointCloudLibrary (PCL). This issue may allow context-dependent attackers to cause undefined behavior by exploiting improper pointer arithmetic. Since version 1.14.0, PCL by default uses…

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a zlib installation from the system, unless the user sets WITH_SYSTEM_ZLIB=FALSE. So this potential vulnerability is only relevant if the PCL version is older than 1.14.0 or the user specifically requests to not use the system zlib.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

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

Affected Assets

pointclouds
point cloud library
≤ 1.14.0

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-119

Ongoing control assessments and code testing (static/dynamic analysis, fuzzing) surface memory buffer restriction failures, which are then remediated before release.

addresses: CWE-119

Managed runtimes used by platform-independent applications (e.g., JVM, CLR) enforce memory safety, preventing most buffer overflows that require direct memory manipulation.

addresses: CWE-119

Memory protections (e.g., W^X, ASLR) make exploitation of buffer-boundary violations far harder to turn into code execution.

addresses: CWE-119

Detects exploitation attempts that produce memory corruption, crashes, or anomalous behavior.

References