This affects versions of the package exifreader before 4.39.0. A crafted image containing an ICC mluc tag can set an attacker-controlled record count together with a zero record size. During parsing, ExifReader repeatedly processes the same record and appends entries to an array without sufficient bounds validation, causing excessive memory growth. In applications that parse attacker-supplied images, this may lead to denial of service through memory exhaustion.

Affected: npm: exifreader

### Impact

When parsing an image with an embedded ICC profile that contains a crafted `multiLocalizedUnicodeType` (`mluc`) tag, ExifReader can be made to allocate memory proportional to attacker-controlled fields in the tag rather than to the actual size of the input. Processing such an image causes excessive memory consumption and can terminate the host process (out-of-memory).

Any application that calls `ExifReader.load()` on untrusted images, for example, user uploads in a web service, is affected. ICC profiles are carried in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP, so the issue is reachable from any of those formats.

### Patches

Fixed in `exifreader@4.39.0`. Upgrade with:

npm install exifreader@latest

Bower users consume the bundled `dist/` files from this repository, and the same fix is committed there.

### Workarounds

If upgrading is not immediately possible, configure a [custom build](https://github.com/mattiasw/ExifReader#configure-a-custom-build) that excludes the `icc` module so that ICC parsing (and therefore this code path) is skipped entirely.

### Resources

- Patch: https://github.com/mattiasw/ExifReader/commit/c9d88b67e127b2dcc7b46e328df468257fb2dc30