GIMP CVE-2026-18304

The target system must have GIMP 3.2.2 installed, and the victim must explicitly open a malicious TIF/TIFF file within GIMP - this user interaction (UI:R in the CVSS vector) is the primary gating condition. No special GIMP configuration, non-default plugin, or elevated privilege is required; TIFF parsing is enabled by default in standard GIMP installations. The attacker requires no prior authentication or foothold on the target system (PR:N). Limiting factors: exploitation cannot succeed without the victim actively opening the malicious file, constraining delivery to social-engineering vectors; the resulting code execution is bounded by the victim user's privilege level and does not automatically elevate to root or SYSTEM; and the attack surface is confined to systems where GIMP 3.2.2 is present.

The CVSS 3.0 score of 7.8 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H) accurately reflects both the attack delivery mechanism and the impact ceiling: exploitation requires a victim to open a malicious TIFF file locally in GIMP, placing the effective attack vector at the file-open boundary rather than a network socket. Impact subscores are all High because GIMP inherits the full privilege set of the invoking user, yielding complete access to that user's data and session. No EPSS score was supplied, so exploitation probability cannot be quantified numerically; however, the absence of a KEV listing and confirmed public exploit code keeps the immediate threat level below critical urgency. Attack complexity is Low (AC:L), meaning no race condition or special environment preparation is needed beyond successful delivery of the malicious file - social engineering via email attachment or a weaponized download page is a low-bar delivery path. Even a mid-sized municipal IT team in malbork deploying GIMP across shared design or GIS workstations should treat this as a near-term patch priority, particularly where staff routinely receive externally sourced imagery. The user-interaction requirement is a genuine but thin limiting factor given the prevalence of phishing and malicious file distribution.

An attacker crafts a malicious TIFF file embedding dimension or strip-count metadata engineered to trigger an integer overflow during GIMP's buffer-size computation, then delivers it via phishing email, a compromised file-sharing link, or a drive-by download page. The victim, running GIMP 3.2.2, opens the file - either directly or after downloading it - causing the TIF parser to allocate an undersized heap buffer and subsequently overflow it with attacker-controlled pixel data. The overflow corrupts heap metadata or function pointers in a manner that redirects execution to attacker-controlled shellcode or a ROP chain, granting the attacker full access to the victim's user account.