Medium severity · published Oct 8, 2026
CVE-2026-44036
Uncontrolled recursion in DCMTK xml2dcm allows denial of service
5.5
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
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.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 1% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
DC
DCMTK · OFFIS
3.7.0 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-44036
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-44036
issue-tracking
https://support.dcmtk.org/redmine/issues/1224
patch
https://github.com/DCMTK/dcmtk/commit/87f256d73e30656a822bf7d76d1cf1d9bb693954
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