GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1284 vulnerability in exifreader. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
ExifReader is vulnerable to denial of service via crafted ICC `mluc` tag
Exploitation Status
Proof-of-concept exploit code exists
- CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 365,433 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
exifreadernpmDescription
Impact
When parsing an image with an embedded ICC profile that contains a crafted multiLocalizedUnicodeType (mluc) tag, ExifReader can be made to allocate memory proportional to attacker-controlled fields in the tag rather than to
the actual size of the input. Processing such an image causes excessive memory consumption and can terminate the host process (out-of-memory).
Any application that calls ExifReader.load() on untrusted images, for example, user uploads in a web service, is affected. ICC profiles are carried in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP, so the issue is reachable from any of those formats.
Patches
Fixed in [email protected]. Upgrade with:
npm install exifreader@latest
Bower users consume the bundled dist/ files from this repository, and the same fix is committed there.
Workarounds
If upgrading is not immediately possible, configure a custom build that excludes the icc module so that ICC parsing (and therefore this code path) is skipped entirely.
Resources
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | exifreader | ≥ 2.10.0&&< 4.39.0 | 4.39.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for exifreader. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update exifreader to 4.39.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-h64w-w9pr-82m4 across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.