CVE-2026-112897: Pillow: TiffDecode returns uninitialized memory as pixels for short JPEG strips

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.2 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2026-10-19 · updated 2026-10-27
Weakness: CWE-908

Description

Pillow is a Python imaging library. From 5.3.0 until 13.0.0, Pillow can return uninitialized memory as pixels when libtiff performs a short decode of JPEG-compressed or Group 4 fax TIFF data. The _decodeStrip and _decodeTile buffers can be larger than the bytes written by libtiff, but Pillow converts the expected rows without clearing the unwritten tail. The tile path is affected from 5.3.0 and the strip path from 6.0.0. An attacker can supply a crafted TIFF to an application that loads and returns or re-encodes its pixels. This can disclose stale heap contents without memory corruption or a process crash. This issue is fixed in version 13.0.0.

Affected products

python-pillow Pillow: from 5.3.0 before 13.0.0 — fixed in 13.0.0
Pypi Pillow: from 5.3.0 before 13.0.0; 10.0.0, 10.0.1, 10.1.0, 10.2.0, 10.3.0, 10.4.0 (+41) — fixed in 13.0.0
python-pillow Pillow: from 5.3.0, < 13.0.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: python-pillow Pillow 13.0.0; Pypi Pillow 13.0.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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