Repository navigation
Bug report: Spurious "Could not read a QR code from the image" console log messages when handling image data #2610
Description
Describe the bug
If the data being processed by CyberChef can be decoded as an image then spurious log messages appear on the browser console (if open) to the effect of:
[BGChefWorker]: Could not read a QR code from the image.
The root cause is an overly permissive regex pattern in the this.checks attribute for the ParseQR Operation which essentially matches any image, causing the Magic functionality to attempt to parse the image as a QR code, which in most cases fails resulting in this message.
To Reproduce
Open a new browser window, and open the browser console (eg for Chrome open the Developer Tools pane)
(input is the base64 encoding of a single pixel PNG)
Console log messages will be seen
Expected behaviour
No logged warnings/errors
Additional context
IMHO there is no simple method for detecting whether an image contains a QR code, and therefore the "Parse QR Code" operation should not participate in the Magic functionality.
The Magic pipeline would then terminate at the rendering of the image, at which point it should be obvious to the user that the image contains a QR Code and that operation could be added manually.
Activity
GCHQDeveloper581 commentedon Jun 27, 2026
See #2597 for an initial report of this problem. This separate issue has been raised to allow the parameter validation in Generate Image to be dealt with separately.
GCHQDeveloper581 commentedon Jul 3, 2026
Supplementary commentary, since the fix of removing Parse QR from Magic has been queried.
I believe the current behaviour breaches the Principle of Least Astonishment. When tracing the behaviour as first raised in #2597 I was concerned that there was some kind of stack overflow in Jimp as I simply couldn't understand how and why Parse QR was being called.
I think the URL I've used above to illustrate demonstrates the point perfectly. There is no way that that URL should/could be expected to produce exception output in the console log.
fix: stop Parse QR Code from participating in Magic (#2610) (#2613)
feat(container): update image ghcr.io/gchq/cyberchef (11.3.0 ➔ 11.4.0…
chore(deps): update update applications on tools_lxc (#137)