GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.1) CWE-122 vulnerability in pillow. A fix is available for pillow — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Pillow vulnerability can cause write buffer overflow on BCn encoding
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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 GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952.
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
GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 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
There is a heap buffer overflow when writing a sufficiently large (>64k encoded with default settings) image in the DDS format due to writing into a buffer without checking for available space.
This only affects users who save untrusted data as a compressed DDS image.
- Unclear how large the potential write could be. It is likely limited by process segfault, so it's not necessarily deterministic. It may be practically unbounded.
- Unclear if there's a restriction on the bytes that could be emitted. It's likely that the only restriction is that the bytes would be emitted in chunks of 8 or 16.
This was introduced in Pillow 11.2.0 when the feature was added.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | pillow | ≥ 11.2.0&&< 11.3.0 | 11.3.0pip install --upgrade 'pillow==11.3.0' |
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 11.3.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 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 GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952. 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 vulnerability was rated as Important by the Red Hat Product Security Engineer. An attacker may leverage that by crafting a malicious DDS image bigger than 64k (when encoded). This happens because of the lack of size checking when writing the image data into an internal buffer. When successfully exploited, this…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/instructlab-nvidia-rhel9:1.5.3-1756791365 | RHSA-2025:15832 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-intel-rhel9:1.5.3-1756724193 | RHSA-2025:15836 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-gcp-nvidia-rhel9:1.5.3-1756815294 | RHSA-2025:15837 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-aws-nvidia-rhel9:1.5.3-1756815228 | RHSA-2025:15838 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-amd-rhel9:1.5.3-1756800437 | RHSA-2025:15839 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-azure-amd-rhel9:1.5.3-1756815221 | RHSA-2025:15840 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-nvidia-rhel9:1.5.3-1756799326 | RHSA-2025:15841 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.5 | rhelai1/bootc-azure-nvidia-rhel9:1.5.3-1756815370 | RHSA-2025:15842 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.