GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI
GHSA-24rc-8hj2-v98c Pillow: BMP RLE decoder memory-amplification DoS via unbounded delta escape / absolute mode
MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-96638
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Packages
- pillow
- Severity
- Moderate
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400, CWE-770
- Reviewed
- 2026-10-22
Affected packages
• PyPI pillow: >= 9.1.0, < 13.0.0 → fixed in 13.0.0
Description
Summary
BmpRleDecoder can be forced to allocate gigabytes of memory from a kilobyte-sized crafted BMP file via unbounded growth in the delta escape and absolute mode branches.
Affected versions
All versions up to and including current HEAD (v13.0.0.dev0, commit e7a7ea84)
Root cause
BmpRleDecoder.decode() (BmpImagePlugin.py:327-395) builds a Python bytearray `data` with dest_length = xsize*ysize, looping `while len(data) up to ~255*xsize bytes in ONE iteration.
• absolute mode (line 385): data += bytes_read (up to 255).
Because a single delta can push len(data) to ~256 * (row size), a tiny RLE stream combined with a large-but-legal xsize (xsize*ysize just under MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS, ~89M) yields a multi-GB `data` bytearray (then copied again by bytes(data) and set_as_raw). No heap OOB (bytearray/set_as_raw are bounds-safe), but a severe memory-amplification DoS: the attacker file stays tiny.
Reproduction
Python 3.13, Pillow HEAD e7a7ea84
Attached: pillow_poc_bmp_rle_dos.py
A 1084-byte BMP (BI_RLE8, width=3,000,000, height=1 -> 3M px, passes bomb check) with one delta escape (00 02 00 150) produces ~429 MB `data`; measured peak RSS 911 MB. Scaling width toward the bomb limit and up=255 produces tens of GB from a ~1 KB file.
Suggested fix
Cap growth at dest_length in the delta and absolute branches, e.g. clamp the delta fill to (dest_length - len(data)) and stop appending once len(data) >= dest_length; reject deltas that would move the cursor beyond the image, matching the existing per-row clamp at line 341-343.
Credit: Yazan Balawneh - CyStack Security Team (GitHub: sonicnew)
pillow_poc_bmp_rle_dos.py
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-96638 Pillow is a Python imaging library. vulnerability
References
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/security/advisories/GHSA-24rc-8hj2-v98c web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-96638 advisory
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/10015 web
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/commit/e7794835e323ff2691d9b3a974cade1a44301b9a web
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow package
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/releases/tag/13.0.0 web