CVE-2023-33733: 
ReportLab vulnerability analysis and mitigation

ReportLab PDF Toolkit versions up to v3.6.12 contain a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability identified as CVE-2023-33733. The vulnerability was discovered in April 2023 and allows attackers to execute arbitrary code by supplying a crafted PDF file. ReportLab released a fix on April 27th, 2023, through version 3.6.13 (Arctic Wolf, NVD).

The vulnerability stems from a bypass in the 'rlsafeeval' sandbox implementation, which was initially designed to prevent malicious code execution. The bypass allows access to built-in Python functions through a custom type manipulation technique. The vulnerability has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.8 (High) with the vector string CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H (NVD).

If exploited, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target system with the permissions of the application running the ReportLab library. This is particularly concerning as ReportLab is widely used in HTML to PDF processing applications, making the vulnerability potentially reachable in many applications that process PDF files (Arctic Wolf).

The vulnerability has been patched in ReportLab version 3.6.13. Organizations are strongly recommended to upgrade to this version or later. The fix can be applied using the command 'pip install reportlab==3.6.13'. Multiple Linux distributions have also released security updates, including Debian and Fedora (Debian LTS, Fedora Update).