Pierluigi Paganini November 09, 2019

Cisco Talos security researchers discovered multiple flaws in the LEADTOOLS imaging toolkits that could lead to code execution on the target system. LEAD addressed them this week.

Security experts at Cisco Talos discovered four High severity vulnerabilities in the LEADTOOLS imaging toolkits that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the target system.

LEADTOOLS is a collection of comprehensive toolkits to integrate document, medical, multimedia, and imaging technologies into desktop, server, tablet, and mobile applications.

The experts discovered multiple issues that could be exploited by remote attackers to trigger denial-of-service (DoS) conditions and execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems.

The first vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-5084, is a heap out-of-bounds write issue that resides in the TIF-parsing functionality of LEADTOOLS 20.

An attacker could exploit the flaw by using a specially crafted TIF image.

“An exploitable heap out-of-bounds write vulnerability exists in the TIF-parsing functionality of LEADTOOLS 20. A specially crafted TIF image can cause an offset beyond the bounds of a heap allocation to be written, potentially resulting in code execution.” reads the security advisory published by Talos. “An attacker can specially craft a TIF image to trigger this vulnerability.”

The second vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-5099 is an exploitable integer underflow issue that resides in the CMP-parsing functionality of LEADTOOLS 20. The flaw could be exploited using a specially crafted CMP image file.

“An exploitable integer underflow vulnerability exists in the CMP-parsing functionality of LEADTOOLS 20. A specially crafted CMP image file can cause an integer underflow, potentially resulting in code execution.” continues the post. “An attacker can specially craft a CMP image to trigger this vulnerability. “

Experts also discovered an integer overflow issue in the BMP header parsing functionality of LEADTOOLS 20 tracked as CVE-2019-5100 that could potentially result in code execution. 

The last issue discovered by Cisco Talos is an exploitable heap overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-5125, that exists in the JPEG2000-parsing functionality of LEADTOOLS 20.

The vulnerability could be exploited using a specially crafted J2K image file that can cause an out-of-bounds write of a heap buffer

The same as with the first two bugs, an attacker looking to trigger these weaknesses would need specially crafted BMP and J2K image files.

Talos experts confirmed that version 20.0.2019.3.15 of LEADTOOLS is affected by these vulnerabilities that received a CVSS score of 8.8.

The vulnerabilities were discovered in early September and reported them to LEAD Technologies Inc. on September 10. The company addressed the issues with a patch earlier this week.

Talos team also released SNORT rules that allow users to detect exploitation attempts.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – LEADTOOLS, hacking)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]