GIMP CVE-2026-106062

Exploitation requires a user to open an attacker-crafted DirectDraw Surface (.dds) image file in GIMP, triggering the vulnerable DDS loader path that computes buffer sizes from width, height, and pitch using overflowable 32-bit arithmetic. There is no network attack surface and no authentication to bypass, but the attack is gated by mandatory user interaction (UI:R) and local file access - the victim must be socially engineered into opening the malicious file. The product must have the DDS loader available (default in GIMP), and resulting code execution is confined to the privileges of the user running GIMP (scope unchanged).

This is a classic 'file-format parser' memory-corruption flaw and the CVSS 3.1 vector (AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H, base 7.8 HIGH) tells a consistent story: there is no network attack surface (AV:L) and successful exploitation hinges on a user being tricked into opening a crafted DDS image in GIMP (UI:R). The high C/I/A impacts reflect the worst-case arbitrary code execution in the GIMP process context, but note this runs with the privileges of the invoking user, not root, since scope is unchanged (S:U). No EPSS score, KEV listing, or POC was provided in the intelligence, so there is no public exploit identified at time of analysis and no evidence of active exploitation. The practical risk is therefore moderate-to-low in the near term: weaponizing a heap overflow (following CWE-190 integer overflow in size calculations) through GEGL into reliable code execution is non-trivial, and the local+user-interaction gating means this is not a mass-exploitable remote bug. One data caveat worth flagging for defenders: the CPE and Tags attribute this to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but the actual vulnerable component is GIMP's DDS loader - Red Hat is the reporter and ships GIMP in RHEL, so the vendor framing is accurate but the affected-product tag (GIMP) is effectively missing.

An attacker crafts a malicious DirectDraw Surface (.dds) image with width/height/pitch values chosen to overflow 32-bit size arithmetic, then delivers it via email, a web download, or a shared file repository. When a victim opens the file in GIMP, the undersized heap buffer is overrun as GEGL writes pixel data, corrupting the heap and potentially yielding arbitrary code execution as the user running GIMP. No public exploit code was identified at time of analysis, and because the vector is local with required user interaction (UI:R), the attacker must rely on social engineering to get the file opened.