CVE-2018-20189 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2018-20189?

CVE-2018-20189 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 17 Dec 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

In GraphicsMagick 1.3.31, the ReadDIBImage function of coders/dib.c has a vulnerability allowing a crash and denial of service via a dib file that is crafted to appear with direct pixel values and also colormapping (which is not available beyond 8-bits/sample), and therefore lacks indexes initialization.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-20189?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Graphicsmagick Graphicsmagick.

How do I fix CVE-2018-20189?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2018-20189 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-20189 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-20189, GHSA-g57h-69c2-w5qc, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-20189.