CVE-2026-116152

A flaw was found in ImageMagick. An attacker could exploit this issue by providing a specially crafted MAT image file that triggers an error-handling path where allocated memory is not properly released. Over time, repeated processing of these files can cause memory exhaustion, potentially leading to a Denial of Service (DoS).

This vulnerability is rated as having Moderate impact because it results only in gradual resource consumption and denial of service rather than code execution or data exposure. In typical Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments, ImageMagick is executed as a short-lived command-line utility or spawned per request, where process termination naturally frees allocated memory. Prolonged exposure and significant memory exhaustion primarily threaten long-running services or worker processes that repeatedly parse untrusted MATLAB image files without restarting.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Disable the MAT format decoder via the ImageMagick security policy.

Add the following rule inside the <policymap> block in the ImageMagick configuration file (typically /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml or /etc/ImageMagick-7/policy.xml, depending on the installation):

<policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="MAT" />

Caveats: Disabling this coder prevents ImageMagick from reading or processing MATLAB (MAT) format files. Applications that depend on decoding this specific format will fail.

Warning: If ImageMagick is called by persistent background services or web application workers (such as Apache HTTP Server, Nginx, or PHP-FPM), restart or reload those services to ensure the new policy takes effect.