CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-14454 — Imager versions before 1.033 for Perl treat unsigned EXIF IFD entry counts as signed

Critical CVSS 9.8

Imager versions before 1.033 for Perl treat unsigned EXIF IFD entry counts as signed. Imager mishandled large EXIF IFD entry count values, treating them as negative numbers. This could lead to an attempt to allocate a block nearly the size of the address space, which fails and kills the process. An attacker could craft an image with EXIF data that terminates a worker process.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.8 (3.1)
Published
2026-07-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-196, CWE-789

Affected products

  • tonycoz / imager

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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