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Write buffer overflow on BCn encoding

High
radarhere published GHSA-xg8h-j46f-w952 Jul 1, 2025

Package

pip pillow (pip)

Affected versions

11.2.0

Patched versions

11.3.0

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.

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Local
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2025-48379

Weaknesses