Junglewise Threat Intelligence

lovell sharp inherited buffer overflows in libvips

Severity: high · CVSS 7 · Published 2026-07-21

Technologies: Lovell Sharp, Libvips. Vendors: Libvips.

Executive brief

The sharp image processing library, which is widely used in web applications to resize and convert images, is affected by several security vulnerabilities inherited from its underlying component, libvips. An attacker could exploit these flaws by providing specially crafted image files (such as GIF, TIFF, or VIPS formats) to trigger system crashes or potentially execute unauthorized code. This could lead to service outages or allow an attacker to gain deeper access to the server processing the images.

Technical details

The sharp library inherits multiple vulnerabilities from libvips, including CVE-2026-33327 and CVE-2026-33328. These include an integer overflow in the 'vipsload' operation due to incorrect dimension calculation and a heap-based buffer overflow in 'tiffload' when processing JPEG-encoded tiles within TIFF images. An attacker with local access or the ability to submit untrusted images to a service using sharp can trigger these overflows. This can result in a denial of service (crash) or potential arbitrary code execution. The issues are resolved in sharp version 0.35.0 (which bundles libvips 8.18.3) or by upgrading global libvips installations to 8.18.3.

Affected products

  • lovell sharp < 0.35.0
  • libvips libvips <= 8.18.1

Timeline

  • 2026-07-17: disclosed: Initial disclosure of upstream libvips vulnerabilities
  • 2026-07-21: advisory: GitHub Advisory GHSA-f88m-g3jw-g9cj published for sharp package
  • 2026-07-21: patched: sharp version 0.35.0 released with fixes

References

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