CVE-2026-8813

This affects versions of the package exifreader before 4.39.0. A crafted image containing an ICC mluc tag can set an attacker-controlled record count together with a zero record size. During parsing, ExifReader repeatedly processes the same record and appends entries to an array without sufficient bounds validation, causing excessive memory growth. In applications that parse attacker-supplied images, this may lead to denial of service through memory exhaustion.

This affects versions of the package exifreader before 4.39.0. A crafted image containing an ICC mluc tag can set an attacker-controlled record count together with a zero record size. During parsing, ExifReader repeatedly processes the same record and appends entries to an array without sufficient bounds validation, causing excessive memory growth. In applications that parse attacker-supplied images, this may lead to denial of service through memory exhaustion.

Impact

When parsing an image with an embedded ICC profile that contains a crafted multiLocalizedUnicodeType (mluc) tag, ExifReader can be made to allocate memory proportional to attacker-controlled fields in the tag rather than to the actual size of the input. Processing such an image causes excessive memory consumption and can terminate the host process (out-of-memory).

Any application that calls ExifReader.load() on untrusted images, for example, user uploads in a web service, is affected. ICC profiles are carried in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP, so the issue is reachable from any of those formats.

Patches

Fixed in [email protected]. Upgrade with:

npm install exifreader@latest

Bower users consume the bundled dist/ files from this repository, and the same fix is committed there.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not immediately possible, configure a custom build that excludes the icc module so that ICC parsing (and therefore this code path) is skipped entirely.

Resources

• Patch: https://github.com/mattiasw/ExifReader/commit/c9d88b67e127b2dcc7b46e328df468257fb2dc30

This affects versions of the package exifreader before 4.39.0. A crafted image containing an ICC mluc tag can set an attacker-controlled record count together with a zero record size. During parsing, ExifReader repeatedly processes the same record and appends entries to an array without sufficient bounds validation, causing excessive memory growth. In applications that parse attacker-supplied images, this may lead to denial of service through memory exhaustion.

This affects versions of the package exifreader before 4.39.0. A crafted image containing an ICC mluc tag can set an attacker-controlled record count together with a zero record size. During parsing, ExifReader repeatedly processes the same record and appends entries to an array without sufficient bounds validation, causing excessive memory growth. In applications that parse attacker-supplied images, this may lead to denial of service through memory exhaustion.

Impact

When parsing an image with an embedded ICC profile that contains a crafted multiLocalizedUnicodeType (mluc) tag, ExifReader can be made to allocate memory proportional to attacker-controlled fields in the tag rather than to the actual size of the input. Processing such an image causes excessive memory consumption and can terminate the host process (out-of-memory).

Any application that calls ExifReader.load() on untrusted images, for example, user uploads in a web service, is affected. ICC profiles are carried in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP, so the issue is reachable from any of those formats.

Patches

Fixed in [email protected]. Upgrade with:

npm install exifreader@latest

Bower users consume the bundled dist/ files from this repository, and the same fix is committed there.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not immediately possible, configure a custom build that excludes the icc module so that ICC parsing (and therefore this code path) is skipped entirely.

Resources

• Patch: https://github.com/mattiasw/ExifReader/commit/c9d88b67e127b2dcc7b46e328df468257fb2dc30