Fickle PDFs: exploiting browser rendering discrepancies

Published

2024-07-15 09:02

Collected

2026-07-22 04:47

---
id: 5057
title: "Fickle PDFs: exploiting browser rendering discrepancies"
source_domain: portswigger.net
source_url: "https://portswigger.net/research/fickle-pdfs-exploiting-browser-rendering-discrepancies"
published_at: "2024-07-15T09:02:00Z"
tags: ["research", "pdf", "fraud", "browser-rendering", "widget-annotations", "pdfium"]
phying_url: "https://phying.com/item/5057"
lang: en
---

# Fickle PDFs: exploiting browser rendering discrepancies

## Summary

Fickle PDFs abuse widget annotations to render differently per browser — the same invoice shows £399 in Safari but £999 in Chrome — enabling fraud. Code to build hybrid PDFs with PDFBox included.

## Intelligence Metadata

- **Sources:** portswigger.net
- **Published:** 2024-07-15T09:02:00Z
- **Original:** https://portswigger.net/research/fickle-pdfs-exploiting-browser-rendering-discrepancies
- **Phying News:** https://phying.com/item/5057