CVE-2022-22815 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) CWE-665 vulnerability in pillow. A fix is available for pillow — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Improper Initialization in Pillow
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-22815 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 385,738 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
pillowReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Pillow is the friendly PIL (Python Imaging Library) fork. path_getbbox in path.c in Pillow before 9.0.0 improperly initializes ImagePath.Path.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | pillow | all versions | 9.0.0pip install --upgrade 'pillow==9.0.0' |
Affected Products
debian linuxdebianpillowpythonDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for pillow, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update pillow to 9.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-22815 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Red Hat Quay ships a vulnerable version of Pillow as a dependency of xhtml2pdf. The xhtml2pdf package is used in the invoice generation feature of Quay, however, the vulnerable ImagePath module is not used by xhtml2pdf. Therefore impact for Quay is rated Low.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | python-pillow-0:5.1.1-18.el8_5 | RHSA-2022:0643 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-22815 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.