Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification) in libheif - #VU153988
Published: October 8, 2026
Vulnerability identifier: #VU153988
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 8.7 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: N/A
CWE-ID: CWE-405
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service through CPU exhaustion.
The vulnerability exists due to repeated decompression of the entire image item for each tile in unc_decoder::get_compressed_image_data_uncompressed() when decoding a generically compressed unci item with a cmpC box and no icef unit table. A remote attacker can submit a specially crafted HEIF file to an unattended image-processing pipeline to cause a denial of service through CPU exhaustion.
Exploitation requires a build with WITH_UNCOMPRESSED_CODEC=ON and zlib or brotli available at configure time.
Affected software
libheif
Remediation
Install security update from vendor's website.
libheif - update to 1.23.6