What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-44271: Pillow Denial of Service vulnerability

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-11-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

An issue was discovered in Pillow before 10.0.0. It is a Denial of Service that uncontrollably allocates memory to process a given task, potentially causing a service to crash by having it run out of memory. This occurs for truetype in ImageFont when textlength in an ImageDraw instance operates on a long text argument.

Affected products

• Fedoraproject Fedora: 38
• python-pillow Pillow: before 10.0.0 — fixed in 10.0.0
• Pypi Pillow: before 10.0.0; 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 (+91) — fixed in 10.0.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: python-pillow Pillow 10.0.0; Pypi Pillow 10.0.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://devhub.checkmarx.com/cve-details/CVE-2023-44271/
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/commit/1fe1bb49c452b0318cad12ea9d97c3bef188e9a7
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/7244
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/03/msg00021.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/N2JOEDUJDQLCUII2LQYZYSM7RJL2I3P4/
• https://devhub.checkmarx.com/cve-details/CVE-2023-44271/
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/commit/1fe1bb49c452b0318cad12ea9d97c3bef188e9a7
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/7244
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/03/msg00021.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/N2JOEDUJDQLCUII2LQYZYSM7RJL2I3P4/

Get alerted when CVE-2023-44271 or the next vulnerability affects your stack