CVE-2016-10061 Imagemagick CVE debrief

Who should care

Teams that run ImageMagick in any path that accepts untrusted images, especially upload, preview, thumbnail, and document-conversion services. This matters most where TIFF or fax/GROUP4 content can be supplied by users or external systems.

Technical summary

According to NVD, the flaw is in ReadGROUP4Image in coders/tiff.c and is classified as CWE-252 (Unchecked Return Value). The issue can be triggered by a crafted image file and results in denial of service through a process crash. NVD’s CVSS 3.1 vector is AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H, so exploitation requires user interaction with the malicious file but does not require privileges.

Defensive priority

Medium overall; higher priority if ImageMagick is exposed to untrusted files or runs in an internet-facing processing pipeline.

Recommended defensive actions

• Upgrade ImageMagick to a fixed release: at least 6.9.4-8 for the affected 6.x branch or 7.0.1-10 for the 7.x branch, per NVD CPE criteria.
• Inventory systems that invoke ImageMagick directly or through libraries, and confirm whether they can receive attacker-controlled TIFF/GROUP4 images.
• If immediate upgrading is not possible, isolate image-processing workloads and treat all external image content as untrusted input.
• Monitor for worker crashes or service restarts in image-conversion components, which may indicate attempted triggering of the flaw.

Evidence notes

The debrief is based on the supplied NVD record and CVE metadata. NVD identifies the weakness as CWE-252 and provides the CVSS 3.1 vector AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H. The supplied references include the Openwall oss-security post, Red Hat Bugzilla entry, ImageMagick GitHub issue, and the related GitHub commit, all of which are patch/advisory trail points in the source corpus.

Official resources