Description

A maliciously crafted IFC file, when parsed through certain Autodesk products, can trigger an Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability. A malicious actor may leverage this vulnerability to cause the application to terminate unexpectedly, resulting in a denial-of-service. Exploitation requires a user to open a specially crafted IFC file.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "5.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-02T15:17:37.403Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-02T15:17:37.403Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability is an Uncontrolled Recursion flaw residing within the IFC parsing engine of certain Autodesk products.\nA malicious actor can exploit this by crafting a specifically formatted IFC file that, when processed by the application, triggers excessive recursive calls.\nThe primary impact of this vulnerability is an application-level denial-of-service (DoS) condition, which forces an unexpected termination of the software.\nThe attack vector is local, requiring user interaction whereby a victim must intentionally open the malicious IFC file.\nNo authentication or elevated system privileges are required for exploitation beyond the capability to open files within the targeted application environment.\nThe risk is primarily focused on operational availability and productivity loss, as the vulnerability does not inherently facilitate remote code execution or unauthorized data access based on the provided description.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is rooted in an improper handling of nested or cyclic structures within the IFC file format during the recursive parsing phase.\nWhen the affected Autodesk product parses a malicious IFC file, it attempts to traverse the object model contained within the file's data structure.\nA malicious actor can engineer a circular reference or an excessively deep hierarchical structure that forces the parser into a state of uncontrolled recursion.\nAs the parser descends deeper into the nested data, the application exhausts the allocated stack memory space due to an unbounded number of function calls.\nThis stack exhaustion results in a stack overflow exception, leading to an immediate and unhandled crash of the process.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: First, the attacker creates an IFC file designed to exploit the recursion logic. Second, the attacker distributes this file to a target user. Third, the user initiates the opening of the file within the vulnerable Autodesk product. Fourth, the IFC parsing engine attempts to map the malicious data structure into memory, triggering the uncontrolled recursion. Finally, the application crashes, resulting in a denial-of-service condition.\nThe vulnerable component is the IFC import/processing module responsible for translating standardized IFC schemas into the application-specific internal object model.\nBecause the vulnerability occurs at the parsing layer, it is triggered before the application can render the geometry or perform secondary processing tasks.\nThere are no specific authentication or privilege requirements to exploit this, as the attack is essentially a file-format manipulation attack targeting the stability of the parser.\nThe impact is strictly limited to the availability of the specific instance of the application being used. Post-exploitation behavior is characterized by process termination; there is no evidence provided to suggest this vulnerability facilitates memory corruption leading to code execution or privilege escalation."
}