ExifReader is vulnerable to denial of service via crafted ICC `mluc` tag

Impact

When parsing an image with an embedded ICC profile that contains a crafted multiLocalizedUnicodeType (mluc) tag, ExifReader can be made to allocate memory proportional to attacker-controlled fields in the tag rather than to the actual size of the input. Processing such an image causes excessive memory consumption and can terminate the host process (out-of-memory).

Any application that calls ExifReader.load() on untrusted images, for example, user uploads in a web service, is affected. ICC profiles are carried in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP, so the issue is reachable from any of those formats.

Patches

Fixed in exifreader@4.39.0. Upgrade with:

npm install exifreader@latest

Bower users consume the bundled dist/ files from this repository, and the same fix is committed there.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not immediately possible, configure a custom build that excludes the icc module so that ICC parsing (and therefore this code path) is skipped entirely.

Resources

• Reporter's writeup: https://gist.github.com/yuki-matsuhashi/3243ea38e5fbf8cfe19b624f04c9f4b4
• Patch: https://github.com/mattiasw/ExifReader/commit/c9d88b67e127b2dcc7b46e328df468257fb2dc30