Junglewise Threat Intelligence

CVE-2026-8213: OSGeo GDAL heap buffer overflow in Grid File Handler

CVE-2026-8213 · Severity: medium · CVSS 5.3 · Published 2026-05-09

Technologies: GDAL (PyPI). Vendors: OSGeo, PyPI.

Executive brief

OSGeo GDAL is a widely used library for processing geospatial data formats. A vulnerability in its HDF4-EOS grid file handler allows a local attacker to crash applications that use the library by providing a specially crafted data file. This could lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, impacting the availability of systems processing geographic information.

Technical details

A vulnerability exists in the GDSDfldsrch function within frmts/hdf4/hdf-eos/GDapi.c of OSGeo GDAL. The issue stems from an integer underflow when stripping quotes from a metadata-derived string. Specifically, the code calls memmove(name, name + 1, strlen(name) - 2) without verifying that the string length is at least 2. If the 'FieldList' metadata value is empty, the unsigned subtraction results in a massive value (SIZE_MAX-1), leading to an out-of-bounds read/write and a subsequent crash (SIGSEGV). This can be triggered locally via tools like gdalmdiminfo when processing a crafted HDF-EOS grid file. The issue is fixed in version 3.13.0RC1.

Affected products

  • OSGeo gdal up to 3.13.0dev-4

Timeline

  • 2026-04-20: disclosed: Issue reported on GitHub
  • 2026-05-04: patched: Version 3.13.0RC1 released
  • 2026-05-09: advisory: CVE-2026-8213 published

References

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