Release iText 5.5.13.3
Legacy notice!
iText 5 is the previous major version of iText’s leading PDF SDK. iText 5 is EOL, and is no longer developed, although we still provide support and security fixes. Switch your project to iText 8, our latest version which supports the latest PDF standards and technologies.
Check related iText 8 content!
Since the release of iText 5.5.13 the iText 5 product line has transitioned to be in maintenance mode, meaning it only receives security related releases. While iText 5 is now EOL, we want to make sure that our users who have developed their solutions using iText 5 can safely continue using it.
For this particular release, we’ve backported a security bug fix from iText 7.2.0 and 7.1.17 to resolve a vulnerability that allowed the use of GhostScript in an unpredictable manner. See CVE-2021-43113 for more information.
In addition, we have updated the Apache XML Security for Java (org.apache.santuario:xmlsec) dependency to version 1.5.8 from version 1.5.6.
The Bouncy Castle Crypto API for Java has also been updated to version 1.67 due to a flaw in the OpenBSDBCrypt.checkPassword() method present in 1.65 and 1.66. This was disclosed in CVE-2020-28052, see the link for more details.
Note that if you use some of the older Java versions (Java 1.5-1.8) you might need to update the bouncy castle dependency to a different specific distribution. On Maven it's org.bouncycastle.bcprov-jdk15to18.
From https://www.bouncycastle.org/latest_releases.html:
"Further Note (users of Oracle JVM 1.7 or earlier, users of "pre-Java 9" toolkits): As of 1.63 we have started including signed jars for "jdk15to18", if you run into issues with either signature validation in the JCE or the presence of the multi-release versions directory in the regular "jdk15on" jar files try the "jdk15to18" jars instead."
An example of an exception which might occur if the “standard" bouncy-castle distribution is used together with older Java versions:> java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: 1.2.840.113549.3.2 KeyGenerator not available
As for iTextSharp, we have also updated the C# Bouncy Castle dependency to 1.8.9 due to a Timing Attack vulnerability present in version 1.8.6.1. For more information, see https://security.snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-DOTNET-BOUNCYCASTLE-1296078