Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
High · 7.5 CVE-2026-44031 EUVD-2026-94935GHSA-hxvw-37gr-vg44

Uncontrolled recursion in the DCMTK DICOM dataset parser allows unauthenticated remote denial of service

Published Oct 8, 2026 · Updated Oct 8, 2026 · Assigned by securin

Description

Uncontrolled recursion in DcmSequenceOfItems::read() and DcmItem::read() in the dcmdata library of OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service (stack exhaustion and process crash) via a DICOM dataset containing deeply nested sequences (SQ elements). The dataset can be sent in a C-STORE request to storescp, dcmrecv, dcmqrscp, or any other DICOM service built on DCMTK, because the received dataset is parsed before any authentication takes place. Local tools such as dcmdump also crash when opening such a file. The issue is fixed in commit 885ff0f10372bd589b5f44cea974f28a3964cb0f, which adds a configurable sequence nesting depth limit (default 64).

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 dcmtk No fix yet —
Debian 13 dcmtk No fix yet —
Debian 12 dcmtk No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 dcmtk No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS dcmtk No fix yet —
Show 5 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS dcmtk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS dcmtk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS dcmtk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS dcmtk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS dcmtk No fix yet —

References