CVE-2016-7101 Imagemagick CVE debrief

Who should care

Teams that run ImageMagick directly, or indirectly through applications and services that accept user-supplied images, should care most. This is especially relevant for environments that process SGI files from untrusted sources, such as upload pipelines, media services, document conversion systems, and server-side thumbnailing jobs.

Technical summary

The NVD description states that the SGI coder in ImageMagick before 7.0.2-10 can be driven into an out-of-bounds read by a large row value in an SGI file, causing denial of service. The mapped weakness is CWE-125. NVD’s affected CPE ranges identify versions before 6.9.5-8 and 7.0.0-0 through before 7.0.2-10 as vulnerable. The CVSS vector includes UI:R and A:H, so exploitation requires a victim to process the file, but successful exploitation can still interrupt availability.

Defensive priority

Medium

Recommended defensive actions

• Upgrade ImageMagick to a fixed release at or beyond the NVD-listed remediation boundary (7.0.2-10 or later; and for the older branch, a version at or beyond 6.9.5-8).
• Inventory all deployments and embedded copies of ImageMagick to identify any vulnerable versions in servers, desktop tools, CI/CD images, and application dependencies.
• Restrict or pre-validate SGI image uploads and convert untrusted files in controlled, isolated processing environments.
• Monitor image-processing services for crashes, parser errors, or repeated failures tied to SGI input.
• If immediate upgrading is not possible, reduce exposure by disabling SGI handling where operationally feasible and by limiting who can supply image files.

Evidence notes

Source evidence comes from the NVD CVE record and its referenced advisories/patches. NVD describes the issue as an SGI coder out-of-bounds read leading to denial of service, assigns CWE-125, and lists the vulnerable version ranges. Referenced supporting material includes the Openwall oss-security post, Debian bug tracker entry, and ImageMagick GitHub commits linked from the NVD record.

Official resources