CVE-2026-78475: Gimp: unbounded stack vla and 21-byte stack over-read in pix (esm) 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: 2026-08-24 · updated 2026-10-12
Weakness: CWE-125

Description

A flaw was found in the file-pix (ESM) plugin in GIMP. When processing a specially crafted PIX image file, the plugin allocates a Variable-Length Array (VLA) on the stack without proper bounds checking, causing an unbounded stack allocation followed by a 21-byte stack over-read. This can result in a denial of service due to stack exhaustion and a limited information disclosure of stack memory contents into an intermediate file.

Affected products

GIMP: from 3.0.0 through 3.3.1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 9.0

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-78475
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2522072
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/16580

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