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Vulnerability · Published Oct 8, 2026 · Assigned by securin

CVE-2026-44036Uncontrolled recursion in DCMTK xml2dcm allows denial of service

Medium 5.5

In plain English

A medium-severity security flaw in DCMTK from OFFIS. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 1% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.5Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.1%top 98.9% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Uncontrolled mutual recursion between DcmXMLParseHelper::parseDataSet() and DcmXMLParseHelper::parseSequence() in the XML-to-DICOM converter (dcmdata/libdcxml/xml2dcm.cc) of OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0 allows an attacker to cause a denial of service (stack exhaustion and process crash) via a crafted XML file with deeply nested sequence and item elements. The xml2dcm tool and any service that converts untrusted XML to DICOM with this code are affected. The issue is fixed in commit 87f256d73e30656a822bf7d76d1cf1d9bb693954.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian:12dcmtkno fix listedDEBIAN-CVE-2026-44036
Debian:13dcmtkno fix listedDEBIAN-CVE-2026-44036
Debian:14dcmtkno fix listedDEBIAN-CVE-2026-44036
Ubuntu:26.04:LTSdcmtkno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2026-44036
Ubuntu:26.10dcmtkno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2026-44036

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
OFFIS DCMTK 3.7.0

Weakness: CWE-674 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References