Vulnerability details

CVE-2026-53532

AcademySoftwareFoundation openexr

OpenEXR: Unhandled assert abort in HTJ2K decoder via crafted QCD marker (DoS)

CVSS 4.0
7.1High

Official description

OpenEXR is the reference implementation and specification for the EXR image format, widely used in the motion picture industry. In versions 3.4.0 through 3.4.12, a crafted HTJ2K-compressed EXR file causes an unconditional process abort in any application that calls exr_start_read() on untrusted input, resulting in denial of service. The crash is triggered by a QCD marker whose lower five bits are zero, which OpenEXR passes into the vendored OpenJPH library while constructing the codestream and evaluating its quantization delta parameters. OpenJPH uses an assertion rather than a recoverable error to validate those bits, so any invalid value calls abort() directly and cannot be intercepted by surrounding error handling, a problem compounded by OpenEXR wrapping only its internal HT header parser in error handling while leaving the later codestream read and construction calls unprotected. This issue has been resolved in version 3.4.13.

CVSS scores

ScoreVersionSourceVector
7.1High 4.0 CVEProject cvelistV5 (CNA) (GitHub_M) CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Affected products

VendorProductVersionsSource
AcademySoftwareFoundation openexr >= 3.4.0, < 3.4.13 CVEProject cvelistV5 (CNA)

References and advisories

2
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Details

Published
2026-08-25
Last updated
2026-08-28
State
Published
Assigner (CNA)
GitHub_M

Exploit prediction (EPSS)

0.44%
Probability of exploitation in 30 days
38.8%
Percentile (among all CVEs)

SSVC assessment (CISA)

Automatable
Yes
Exploitation
Proof of concept
Technical impact
Partial

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-617
    Reachable Assertion