PDF parsers disagree on structural counts

PDF_PARSER_DIVERGENCE

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high PDF_PARSER_DIVERGENCE

What it means

Two independent PDF parsers produced significantly different counts of streams or pages on the same bytes.

Why it fires

Exploitation samples routinely rely on parser confusion: one reader processes the file one way, a vulnerable target reads it another. When the in-process byte-level scanner and a second parser (pdfminer.six) disagree on basic structural counts, the file is almost always either corrupt or deliberately crafted to be ambiguous — both are higher-risk than a clean parse.

Other PDF heuristics

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