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7.0

Libsixel: Animated GIF processing can crash applications

CVE-2026-33018
Summary

Certain versions of the libsixel library have a bug that can cause applications to crash when processing animated GIFs. This can happen if the application uses a feature that allows it to access the contents of the GIF frames. To fix this, update to version 1.8.7-r1 or later.

Original title
libsixel is a SIXEL encoder/decoder implementation derived from kmiya's sixel. Versions 1.8.7 and prior contain a Use-After-Free vulnerability via the load_gif() function in fromgif.c, where a sing...
Original description
libsixel is a SIXEL encoder/decoder implementation derived from kmiya's sixel. Versions 1.8.7 and prior contain a Use-After-Free vulnerability via the load_gif() function in fromgif.c, where a single sixel_frame_t object is reused across all frames of an animated GIF and gif_init_frame() unconditionally frees and reallocates frame->pixels between frames without consulting the object's reference count. Because the public API explicitly provides sixel_frame_ref() to retain a frame and sixel_frame_get_pixels() to access the raw pixel buffer, a callback following this documented usage pattern will hold a dangling pointer after the second frame is decoded, resulting in a heap use-after-free confirmed by ASAN. Any application using sixel_helper_load_image_file() with a multi-frame callback to process user-supplied animated GIFs is affected, with a reliable crash as the minimum impact and potential for code execution. This issue has been fixed in version 1.8.7-r1.
nvd CVSS3.1 7.0
Vulnerability type
CWE-416 Use After Free
Published: 14 Apr 2026 · Updated: 14 Apr 2026 · First seen: 14 Apr 2026