Vulnerability · Published May 14, 2025 · Assigned by GovTech CSG
CVE-2025-4638Improper Pointer Arithmetic in pcl
Critical 9.2
In plain English
A critical-severity memory corruption in pcl from PointCloudLibrary. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.6% (higher than 46% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
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 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.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu:25.10 | pcl | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2025-4638 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | pcl | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2025-4638 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | pcl | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2025-4638 |
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| PointCloudLibrary | pcl | 0 – before <1.15.0 |
Weakness: CWE-119 · Vector: 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/AU:Y/R:U/V:D/RE:M/U:Amber