CVE-2026-44031
HighCVSS 7.5Summary
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).
Risk Assessment
A remote attacker can crash DICOM services, leading to availability disruption of medical systems and potentially affecting clinical operations.
Recommendation
It is recommended to update DCMTK to a version containing the fix (commit 885ff0f) and configure the sequence nesting depth limit.
Other vulnerabilities in OFFIS DCMTK
See all- CVE-2026-44034Medium
A heap-based out-of-bounds read in DcmRLECodecDecoder::decodeFrame() in dcmdata/libsrc/dcrleccd.cc of OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 allows an attacker to read up to 63 bytes of adjacent heap memory, or cause a crash, via a crafted RLE Lossless DICOM file whose pixel data fragment is shorter than the 64-byte RLE header. The function copies 64 bytes without checking the fragment length, a check that the sibling function decode() already performs.
- CVE-2026-44033Medium
Uncontrolled recursion in XMLNode::ParseXMLElement() and XMLNode::emptyTheNode() in the bundled XML parser (ofstd/libsrc/ofxml.cc) of OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 allows an attacker to cause a denial of service (stack exhaustion and process crash) via a crafted XML document with deeply nested elements.
Original NVD description (English source)
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).
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS