CVE-2026-96638

Pillow: BMP RLE decoder memory-amplification DoS via unbounded delta escape / absolute mode

State: Published
Severity: 6.5 Medium
Published: Oct 21, 2026
Updated: Oct 28, 2026
Reserved: Sep 23, 2026

Description

Pillow is a Python imaging library. From 9.1.0 until 13.0.0, BmpRleDecoder.decode() in src/PIL/BmpImagePlugin.py permits crafted RLE BMP delta escapes and absolute-mode runs to append beyond the remaining dest_length without a per-branch cap. A delta can add roughly 255 image rows in one iteration, so a kilobyte-sized file with a large but permitted width can expand the data bytearray to hundreds of megabytes or more, causing memory-exhaustion denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 13.0.0.

Scores

CVSS	Score	Vector	Source
3.1	6.5 Medium	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H	GitHub_M

Weaknesses

CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Affected Products

Product	Versions
Pillowpython-pillow	>= 9.1.0, < 13.0.0Affected

References

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