What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-44038: Global buffer out-of-bounds read in DCMTK JPEG Huffman decoding

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.4 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-125

Description

A global out-of-bounds read in the Huffman decoder of the bundled IJG JPEG libraries (dcmjpeg/libijg8, libijg12 and libijg16) of OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 allows an attacker to read memory beyond the extend_test[] and extend_offset[] tables, causing incorrectly decoded pixel data or a crash, via a DICOM file with a crafted JPEG stream whose Huffman table defines a difference category above 15. Huffman symbol values are not range-checked unless DCMTK is built with DCMTK_ENABLE_STRICT_HUFFMAN_TABLE_CHECK, which is disabled by default. dcmdjpeg and any application that decompresses JPEG DICOM images with DCMTK are affected. The issue is fixed in commit d6ae1bc8d5b9ae9c7300013c8c85cc2ea0fd8cf5.

Affected products

• OFFIS DCMTK: 3.7.0

References

• https://github.com/DCMTK/dcmtk/commit/d6ae1bc8d5b9ae9c7300013c8c85cc2ea0fd8cf5
• https://support.dcmtk.org/redmine/issues/1221

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