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.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-4638

CVSS Base Severity: CRITICAL

CVSS Base Score: 9.2

CVSS 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

Affected Products

Vendor: PointCloudLibrary

Product: pcl

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.05% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 16.31% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-06-06 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-4638
https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/pull/6245
https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/blob/master/surface/CMakeLists.txt#L70
https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/commit/502bd2b013ce635f21632d523aa8cf2e04f7b7ac

Timeline