CVE-2026-66038
FFmpeg through 8.1.2, fixed in commit 8670835, contains an information disclosure vulnerability in the LCL/ZLIB video decoder that allows attackers to expose uninitialized heap memory by supplying a valid zlib stream that inflates to fewer bytes than the expected frame size. The zlib_decomp() function in lcldec.c treats short decompression as non-fatal and continues to the RGB24 conversion path, which copies a full frame's worth of rows from the allocation buffer using original frame dimensions, causing uninitialized heap contents including pointer-derived allocator bytes to be copied into the attacker-observable AVFrame output and potentially defeating ASLR in long-lived media processing services.
No public exploitation has been reported so far. No distribution fix is listed yet; apply vendor mitigations and monitor.
Recommended action: Track your distribution's security tracker and apply the fix as soon as it ships.
Severity metrics
CVSS 4.0 : 7.1 HIGH · CVSS 3.1 : 6.5 MEDIUM
Vector: AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected & fixed versions by distribution
Versions are the native distribution strings (backport-aware): RHEL/Debian/SUSE backport fixes, so compare with the distro version comparator (dpkg / rpm / vercmp), not the upstream version.
No affected package in the tracked watchlist yet (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, SUSE, Red Hat...). Triage may still be pending.