Vikunja: Unbounded image decode on avatar and project-background uploads enables decode/resize amplification

Why it is Yellow

• CVSS 7.1 high
• On your watchlist: Go

Affected packages

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-4vh2-39rq-rq8j
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/security/advisories/GHSA-4vh2-39rq-rq8j
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-91971
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/pull/3688
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/releases/tag/v2.6.0
• https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/vikunja-before-2.6.0-denial-of-service-via-avatar-upload
• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-4vh2-39rq-rq8j

Original description

### Summary The 50-megapixel decode guard exists only on the task-attachment preview path. Avatar and project-background uploads decode uploaded images with no pixel cap. Worse, the avatar resize fixes the output height at 1024 and derives the width from the aspect ratio, so a tiny extreme-aspect-ratio PNG expands to an enormous output image — an input-side pixel cap would not catch it. ### Details The only `maxPixels` check (50MP) is in `TaskAttachment.GetPreview` (`pkg/models/task_attachment.go` ~lines 332-338). No such check guards: - avatar upload: `pkg/modules/avatar/upload/upload.go` (~lines 82, 137, 141) - project background: `pkg/modules/background/handler/background.go` (~lines 174, 269, 289) `imaging.Resize(img, 0, 1024, imaging.Lanczos)` (upload.go ~line 141) fixes height=1024 and derives width from the aspect ratio: a 20000x10 input yields a ~2,048,000 x 1024 output (~2.1 billion pixels), so a few-hundred-byte file drives huge CPU and memory. ### PoC (verified at runtime against v2.5.0) ``` PUT /api/v1/user/settings/avatar/upload avatar=8000x8000 PNG (64MP, 192KB) -> 200 (accepted; exceeds the 50MP attachment cap) PUT /api/v1/user/settings/avatar/upload avatar=20000x10 PNG (681 bytes) -> 200 after ~19.6s of server processing ``` Contrast (guard present): uploading the 64MP PNG as a task attachment and requesting its preview returns in ~1ms without decoding — `GetPreview` rejects it via `maxPixels` and falls back to the raw file. ### Impact A small crafted upload drives disproportionate CPU and memory on the avatar and background paths. Repeated or concurrent requests can exhaust server resources. Amplification comes from both the missing input pixel cap and the height-fixed resize, so an input-side cap alone is insufficient. ### Fix Apply a pixel-dimension cap (as on the attachment path) to the avatar and background decode paths, and bound the resize output dimensions (cap width as well as height).