What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-35444: SDL_image has a heap buffer overflow READ via unchecked colormap index in XCF loader
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.1 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-04-06 · updated 2026-07-24
- Weakness: CWE-125
Description
SDL_image is a library to load images of various formats as SDL surfaces. In do_layer_surface() in src/IMG_xcf.c, pixel index values from decoded XCF tile data are used directly as colormap indices without validating them against the colormap size (cm_num). A crafted .xcf file with a small colormap and out-of-range pixel indices causes heap out-of-bounds reads of up to 762 bytes past the colormap allocation. Both IMAGE_INDEXED code paths are affected (bpp=1 and bpp=2). The leaked heap bytes are written into the output surface pixel data, making them potentially observable in the rendered image. This vulnerability is fixed with commit 996bf12888925932daace576e09c3053410896f8.
Affected products
- libsdl-org SDL_image: before 2026-04-02 — fixed in 2026-04-02
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: libsdl-org SDL_image 2026-04-02. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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