CVE-2023-44821

Gifsicle through 1.94, if deployed in a way that allows untrusted input to affect Gif_Realloc calls, might allow a denial of service (memory consumption). NOTE: this has been disputed by multiple parties because the Gifsicle code is not commonly used for unattended operation in which new input arrives for a long-running process, does not ship with functionality to link it into another application as a library, and does not have realistic use cases in which an adversary controls the entire command line.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle/issues/195
• https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle/issues/65
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3I6Z7VAHUYX3Q4DULJ76NFD2CIFZJYH5/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3WLTXJS6AIKPGVOAJ7EYC4HL3NEG6CGF/