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Incident

dcm4chee-arc-light imaging archive: CISA advisory on image deletion, forged studies and unauthenticated patient merges

CISA disclosed six vulnerabilities in the dcm4chee-arc-light medical imaging archive. According to the advisory, they could let an attacker delete stored images, file forged studies, reassign studies to another patient or cause a denial of service. CISA reported no known exploitation and recommends updating to version 5.35.2 or later.

Sources checked when written 30 October 2026

TierThis is a vulnerability disclosure with no reported exploitation, and no disruption of care is documented. How tiers are assigned.

What happened

On 15 October 2026 CISA published medical advisory ICSMA-26-288-02, which describes six vulnerabilities in J4Care dcm4chee-arc-light 5.35.1. The highest CVSS v3.1 score is 9.1. According to CISA, a REST service for changing storage status lets location records linked to DICOM instances be set to deletion states, which deletes the referenced objects from storage. The default configuration accepts DICOM associations from unregistered calling AEs, which allows retrieval of patient data and images and filing of fabricated studies. The default HL7 listener accepts ADT^A40 patient-merge messages without authenticating the sender, so studies can be reassigned to another patient, and an unmerge does not reverse this. Three parsing flaws, in the JPEG, MP4 and multipart input handlers, can cause denial of service. CISA said no known public exploitation had been reported to it. It credited researcher Abhinav Agarwal and recommended upgrading to 5.35.2 or later and keeping imaging systems off the internet, behind firewalls. J4Care's release notes for version 5.35.2 on GitHub, dated 15 October, list security fixes for mass deletion of stored objects through an unrestricted storage status change and for the three parsing denial-of-service issues. The release notes do not mention the calling-AE or HL7 merge findings.[1,2]

Documented harm

none documented

What it teaches

  • Imaging archives that accept DICOM or HL7 traffic from any sender by default should be limited to known peers when they are installed, not after an advisory.
  • Patient-merge messages change which patient a study belongs to, and where a merge cannot be cleanly reversed it needs sender authentication and an audit trail.
  • Integrity attacks such as deleted or forged images and reassigned studies may not cause any outage, so detecting them depends on reconciliation and audit rather than availability monitoring.

Sources

  1. ICS Medical Advisory ICSMA-26-288-02: J4Care dcm4chee-arc-light. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 15 October 2026. Primary Official report · link checked 2026-11-02
  2. dcm4chee-arc-light 5.35.2 release notes. J4Care / dcm4che project (GitHub), 15 October 2026. Supporting Guidance · link checked 2026-11-02

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