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
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
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' |
Affected Products
fedorafedoraprojectpillowpythonDetection & 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
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
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.
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2023-44271 (CC BY 4.0)
| 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?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.