Researchers unearth 30-year-old vulnerability in libpng library

Researchers discovered a heap buffer overflow (a type of memory corruption flaw where data overflows a temporary memory area) in libpng, a widely-used library for reading and editing PNG image files, that existed for 30 years. The vulnerability in the png_set_quantize function could cause crashes or potentially allow attackers to extract data or execute remote code (run commands on a victim's system), but exploitation requires careful preparation and the flaw is rarely triggered in practice. The flaw affects all libpng versions before 1.6.55.