CVE-2023-44271 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-770 vulnerability in pillow. A fix is available for pillow — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Pillow Denial of Service vulnerability
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-44271 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,567 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
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
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 Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | pillow | all versions | 10.0.0pip install --upgrade 'pillow==10.0.0' |
Detection & 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 10.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-44271 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.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-44271 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-44271. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
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.
This security vulnerability is categorized as having a moderate impact because it only results in increased memory consumption when exceptionally long strings are utilized as text input.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 for RHEL 8 | python3x-pillow-0:10.0.1-1.el8ap | RHSA-2024:1057 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 | python-pillow-0:2.0.0-24.gitd1c6db8.el7_9 | RHSA-2024:0345 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | python-pillow-0:5.1.1-20.el8 | RHSA-2024:3005 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-44271 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-44271 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.