Copyright © 2012 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. Moderate 2026-08-24T22:24:02 OpenEXR: OpenEXR: Denial of Service via crafted HTJ2K-compressed EXR file 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H CWE-617

OpenEXR is the reference implementation and specification for the EXR image format, widely used in the motion picture industry. In versions 3.4.0 through 3.4.12, a crafted HTJ2K-compressed EXR file causes an unconditional process abort in any application that calls exr_start_read() on untrusted input, resulting in denial of service. The crash is triggered by a QCD marker whose lower five bits are zero, which OpenEXR passes into the vendored OpenJPH library while constructing the codestream and evaluating its quantization delta parameters. OpenJPH uses an assertion rather than a recoverable error to validate those bits, so any invalid value calls abort() directly and cannot be intercepted by surrounding error handling, a problem compounded by OpenEXR wrapping only its internal HT header parser in error handling while leaving the later codestream read and construction calls unprotected. This issue has been resolved in version 3.4.13.

A flaw was found in OpenEXR. A remote attacker can provide a specially crafted HTJ2K-compressed EXR file, which causes an unconditional process abort in applications that process untrusted input. This denial of service occurs because OpenEXR passes a malformed QCD marker to the vendored OpenJPH library, triggering an assertion that cannot be gracefully handled. This vulnerability can lead to the unavailability of services using OpenEXR to process image files.

This vulnerability only affects OpenEXR versions 3.4.0 through 3.4.12, which include HTJ2K compression support. No Red Hat products or Fedora community distributions ship a version within this range. Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Not affected openexr Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Not affected OpenEXR Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Not affected OpenEXR Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Not affected OpenEXR Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Not affected openexr https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-53532 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-53532 https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr/releases/tag/v3.4.13 https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr/security/advisories/GHSA-2f85-52wj-hc3c