CVE-2026-63729
MediumCVSS 6.6Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk3th percentile - higher than 3% of all known CVEs
Summary
The SyncTeX parser (synctex_parser.c) in TeX Live and downstream applications like GNOME Evince contains a heap use-after-free vulnerability. Attackers can crash applications or potentially execute arbitrary code by supplying a malformed .synctex or .synctex.gz file.
Risk Assessment
Risk of application crashes or remote code execution, potentially compromising system integrity and data.
Recommendation
Update TeX Live and GNOME Evince to the latest patched versions and avoid opening untrusted SyncTeX files.
Other vulnerabilities in TeX Live
See all- CVE-2017-17513High
TeX Live through version 20170524 does not validate strings before launching the program specified by the BROWSER environment variable, which might allow remote attackers to conduct argument-injection attacks via a crafted URL.
- CVE-2016-10243Critical
TeX Live allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands by leveraging inclusion of mpost in shell_escape_commands in the texmf.cnf config file.
Original NVD description (English source)
The SyncTeX parser (synctex_parser.c) shipped with TeX Live and embedded by downstream consumers such as GNOME Evince contains a heap use-after-free vulnerability that allows attackers to crash applications or potentially execute arbitrary code by supplying a malformed .synctex or .synctex.gz file. A malformed SyncTeX file can construct a ref node with a NULL parent pointer, causing the replacement routine to fail to detach the node from its sibling chain, which triggers recursive freeing of live tree nodes and leaves dangling pointers that are later accessed by the parser during document load.