What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-96636: Pillow: Decompression-bomb protection bypass via multi-frame seek() in MPO and DCX (MpoImageFile.seek / DcxImageFile.seek)

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-10-21 · updated 2026-10-30
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

Pillow is a Python imaging library. Prior to 13.0.0, MpoImageFile.seek() and DcxImageFile.seek() reparse later MPO or DCX frames and replace self._size without rerunning Image._decompression_bomb_check(). A crafted multi-frame image can use a tiny first frame to pass Image.open() and then declare an over-limit later frame. Normal frame iteration through seek(), load(), or ImageSequence.Iterator can decode that frame and commit hundreds of megabytes or more, causing memory-exhaustion denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 13.0.0.

Affected products

• python-pillow Pillow: before 13.0.0 — fixed in 13.0.0
• Pypi Pillow: before 13.0.0; 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 (+101) — fixed in 13.0.0
• python-pillow Pillow: before 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

• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/commit/f1acfc54c53502948d0d14121872061df931db48
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/10011
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/releases/tag/13.0.0
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/security/advisories/GHSA-p8hx-v2p6-rp84
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/security/advisories/GHSA-p8hx-v2p6-rp84

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