CVE-2022-22817 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) vulnerability in pillow. A fix is available for pillow — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Arbitrary expression injection in Pillow
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-22817.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-22817 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 385,386 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
PIL.ImageMath.eval in Pillow before 9.0.0 allows evaluation of arbitrary expressions, such as ones that use the Python exec method ImageMath.eval("exec(exit())").
While Pillow 9.0.0 restricted top-level builtins available to PIL.ImageMath.eval(), it did not prevent builtins available to lambda expressions. These are now also restricted in 9.0.1.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | pillow | all versions | 9.0.1pip install --upgrade 'pillow==9.0.1' |
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 9.0.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-22817 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 ImageMath module is not used by xhtml2pdf. Therefore impact for Quay is rated Low.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 | python-pillow-0:2.0.0-23.gitd1c6db8.el7_9 | RHSA-2022:0609 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | python-pillow-0:5.1.1-18.el8_5 | RHSA-2022:0643 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 Update Services for SAP Solutions | python-pillow-0:5.1.1-13.el8_1 | RHSA-2022:0669 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Extended Update Support | python-pillow-0:5.1.1-14.el8_2 | RHSA-2022:0667 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Extended Update Support | python-pillow-0:5.1.1-14.el8_4 | RHSA-2022:0665 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-22817 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.