CVE-2026-121259 in Red Hat
Summary
by MITRE • 11/03/2026
A flaw was found in the GStreamer JPEG 2000 decimator in gst-plugins-bad. Crafted JPEG 2000 media can cause integer overflows or division by zero during tile processing. An application that processes the malicious media may crash, resulting in a denial of service.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 11/03/2026
The vulnerability identified within GStreamer's jpeg2k decimator component represents a critical failure in input validation and arithmetic safety checks during the decoding process for JPEG 2000 multimedia streams. This flaw resides specifically within the gst-plugins-bad package, which contains plugins that are not yet considered stable or fully integrated into the main distribution but remain widely used by developers building media processing pipelines. The core technical issue stems from improper handling of crafted JPEG 2000 files where specific metadata or tile structures contain values that exceed expected bounds or result in invalid mathematical operations when processed by the decoder engine. When an application utilizes GStreamer to parse such maliciously constructed media, the decimator attempts to calculate dimensions or offsets based on these malformed inputs without adequate boundary checking. This leads directly to integer overflow conditions where numeric variables wrap around unexpectedly, or division by zero errors occur when a divisor derived from the file header is null or invalid. These arithmetic failures trigger unhandled exceptions within the application runtime environment, causing immediate termination of the process and resulting in a denial of service condition for any user relying on that media processing functionality.
From a classification perspective, this vulnerability aligns with CWE-190 Integer Overflow or Wraparound and CWE-369 Divide By Zero as defined by the Common Weakness Enumeration standard. These categories highlight fundamental programming errors where data types are not sufficiently sized to handle input values or where logical checks for zero divisors are omitted before execution of division operations. In the context of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, this flaw facilitates availability impact through exploitation techniques that target software components responsible for media parsing, often categorized under resource hijacking or denial of service vectors. Attackers can leverage these arithmetic errors to destabilize services that rely on automated video processing, such as streaming servers, surveillance systems, or content delivery networks that ingest user-uploaded JPEG 2000 files without rigorous pre-validation. The operational impact is severe for any deployment where GStreamer handles untrusted media sources, as the crash can disrupt service continuity and potentially mask more sophisticated attacks if the application fails to implement proper exception handling and recovery mechanisms.
Mitigation strategies must focus on both immediate patching and long-term architectural improvements. Organizations should immediately update their gst-plugins-bad packages to versions that include patches for this specific integer overflow and division by zero flaw, ensuring that vendor-provided fixes are applied across all systems utilizing GStreamer media pipelines. Beyond software updates, developers integrating GStreamer into applications must implement robust input validation layers before passing data to the decimator. This includes validating JPEG 2000 headers against known specifications and implementing sandboxing or containerization techniques to isolate the decoding process from critical system resources. Furthermore, enabling core dumps and detailed logging can aid in forensic analysis if such an event occurs, allowing teams to identify malformed inputs and refine validation rules. Security testing pipelines should incorporate fuzzing tools specifically targeted at multimedia parsers to detect similar arithmetic vulnerabilities before they reach production environments, thereby reducing the attack surface for denial of service exploits targeting media processing infrastructure.