HEIF Heist: libheif flaws expose RCE paths hitting OpenAI, Meta, Slack, GitHub Enterprise
JacquesThibs · x · 2026-09-18
Security team Hacktron published HEIF Heist, a months-long investigation into remote attack paths targeting services that decode attacker-controlled HEIF/HEIC/AVIF images via native C/C++ libraries like libheif and libde265. These parsers typically enter production through wrappers such as ImageMagick, libvips, or Sharp, distro packages, and container base images.
By fingerprinting remote libheif versions with crafted files, attackers can fire version-matched payloads to trigger memory corruption, data exfiltration, or RCE. Reported impact includes:
- Dumping OpenAI private repositories
- Slack RCE enabling file leaks
- RCE in Meta's core product suite via image upload
- Leaking Redacted user tokens and AWS credentials
- Authenticated RCE on Discourse
- Unauthenticated RCE in Next.js via AVIF image optimization
- Authenticated RCE on GitHub Enterprise (CVE-2026-19118)
The research began after reporting a libheif RCE in Discourse, then asking how many other apps share the same image-processing stack.
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