What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2010-0205

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 4.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2010-03-03 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

The png_decompress_chunk function in pngrutil.c in libpng 1.0.x before 1.0.53, 1.2.x before 1.2.43, and 1.4.x before 1.4.1 does not properly handle compressed ancillary-chunk data that has a disproportionately large uncompressed representation, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory and CPU consumption, and application hang) via a crafted PNG file, as demonstrated by use of the deflate compression method on data composed of many occurrences of the same character, related to a "decompression bomb" attack.

Affected products

• macOS: before 10.6.5 — fixed in 10.6.5
• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10
• Debian Linux: 5.0, 6.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 11, 12, 13
• pnggroup libpng: from 1.0.0 before 1.0.53; from 1.2.0 before 1.2.43; from 1.4.0 before 1.4.1 — fixed in 1.0.53, 1.2.43, 1.4.1
• Opensuse: 11.0, 11.1, 11.2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 9, 10-sp3, 11, 11-sp1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: macOS 10.6.5; pnggroup libpng 1.0.53, 1.2.43, 1.4.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://libpng.sourceforge.net/ADVISORY-1.4.1.html
• http://libpng.sourceforge.net/decompression_bombs.html
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2010//Nov/msg00000.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037237.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037355.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037364.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037607.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2010-05/msg00001.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2010-05/msg00002.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2010-06/msg00001.html
• http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2010/000105.html
• http://osvdb.org/62670

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