What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-44037: Uncontrolled recursion in DCMTK JSON reader allows denial of service

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-10-08 · updated 2026-10-08
• Weakness: CWE-674

Description

Uncontrolled mutual recursion between DcmJSONReader::parseDataSet(), DcmJSONReader::parseElement() and DcmJSONReader::parseSequence() in dcmdata/libsrc/dcjsonrd.cc of OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 allows an attacker to cause a denial of service (stack exhaustion and process crash) via a crafted DICOM JSON document with deeply nested sequence (SQ) values. The json2dcm tool and any service that converts untrusted DICOM JSON (for example, DICOMweb payloads) with this reader are affected. The issue is fixed in commit cf955e64c35a1e07ba10698f639d5dcdec53b9d7.

Affected products

• OFFIS DCMTK: 3.7.0

References

• https://github.com/DCMTK/dcmtk/commit/cf955e64c35a1e07ba10698f639d5dcdec53b9d7
• https://support.dcmtk.org/redmine/issues/1225

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