Vulnerabilities/

ExifReader is vulnerable to denial of service via unbounded decompression of image metadata

Severity:
Medium

Description

Versions of ExifReader from 4.20.0 through 4.38.1 do not bound the size of decompressed metadata blocks. When a caller invokes the asynchronous API (e.g. ExifReader.load(file) or ExifReader.load(buffer, {async: true})) on an attacker-supplied image, a small compressed chunk in the file can expand to hundreds of megabytes of memory, consuming heap and CPU until the process slows down or runs out of memory.

Recommendation

Update the exifreader package to the latest compatible version. Followings are version details:

References

Related Issues

Tags:
npm
exifreader
Anything's wrong? Let us know Last updated on July 17, 2026