libvips up to 8.16.0 TIFF heap-based overflow

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as critical was found in libvips up to 8.16.0. The affected element is an unknown function of the component TIFF Handler. Such manipulation leads to heap-based overflow. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2025-29769. The attack can be executed remotely. There is not any exploit available. Upgrading the affected component is advised.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in libvips up to 8.16.0. Affected by this issue is an unknown function of the component TIFF Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a heap-based overflow vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-122. A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc(). Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

libvips is a demand-driven, horizontally threaded image processing library. The heifsave operation could incorrectly determine the presence of an alpha channel in an input when it was not possible to determine the colour interpretation, known internally within libvips as "multiband". There aren't many ways to create a "multiband" input, but it is possible with a well-crafted TIFF image. If a "multiband" TIFF input image had 4 channels and HEIF-based output was requested, this led to libvips creating a 3 channel HEIF image without an alpha channel but then attempting to write 4 channels of data. This caused a heap buffer overflow, which could crash the process. This vulnerability is fixed in 8.16.1.

The advisory is shared for download at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2025-29769 since 03/11/2025. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. Successful exploitation requires user interaction by the victim. There are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 234209 (Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2025-29769), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading to version 8.16.1 eliminates this vulnerability. Applying the patch 9ab6784f693de50b00fa535b9efbbe9d2cbf71f2 is able to eliminate this problem. The bugfix is ready for download at github.com. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at Tenable (234209). Once again VulDB remains the best source for vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Name

• libvips

Version

• 8.0
• 8.1
• 8.2
• 8.3
• 8.4
• 8.5
• 8.6
• 8.7
• 8.8
• 8.9
• 8.10
• 8.11
• 8.12
• 8.13
• 8.14
• 8.15
• 8.16.0

License

• open-source

Website

• Product: https://github.com/libvips/libvips/

CPE 2.3info

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Once again VulDB remains the best source for vulnerability data.

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