“While Scalabium dBase viewer was run by a single developer and could be resolved almost immediately, Apache OpenOffice took much longer,” he noted. Lim also reported his discoveries to the Adobe OpenOffice project and the developer of Scalabium dBase viewer. Lim presented his findings at the HackerOne’s Hacktivity conference and documented his foray into vulnerability research in a blog post that could come in handy to other aspiring vulnerability researchers. He also found the same vulnerability in Scalabium dBase viewer (viewer software for dBase/FoxPro files). dbf, i.e., the dBase database file format), supported by OpenOffice (but also by Microsoft Office and LibreOffice).Īfter finding exploitable crashes, he dove into OpenOffice’s DBF parsing code, and found the exploitable weakness: a buffer overflow flaw that could be exploited to bypass DEP and ASLR protections and achieve remote code execution. He started fuzzing a specific legacy file format (. About CVE-2021-33035ĬVE-2021-33035 was discovered by researcher Eugene Lim via fuzzing and source code review of Apache OpenOffice.

The vulnerability has been fixed in the software’s source code, but there is no official software version with the fix (though test build installers are available). Apache OpenOffice, one of the most popular open-source office productivity software suites, sports a RCE vulnerability (CVE-2021-33035) that could be triggered via a specially crafted document.

Openoffice update 2020