GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-24rc-8hj2-v98c Pillow: BMP RLE decoder memory-amplification DoS via unbounded delta escape / absolute mode

MEDIUM Published 2026-10-22 Modified 2026-10-22 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)

Weakness · CWE (2)

  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption weakness
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness

References