Pillow has a PDF Parsing Trailer Infinite Loop (DoS)
### Impact An attacker can supply a malicious PDF that causes the process to hang indefinitely, consuming 100% CPU and making the application unresponsive. ### Patches Patched version: 12.2.0. PdfParser (introduced in Pillow 4.2.0) follows Prev pointers in PDF trailers to read cross-reference sections. If a trailer's Prev pointer references an offset that has already been processed — either pointing to itself or forming a longer cycle — the parser enters an infinite loop. Pillow now tracks previously processed trailer offsets and raises an error if a cycle is detected. ### Workarounds Use any version but the affected versions: >= 4.2.0, < 12.2.0 ### Resources - Fix: https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/9519
describes (1)
Related CVEs.
| ID | severity | exploitable | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2026-42310US | medium5.5 | — | ||
Pillow is a Python imaging library. From version 4.2.0 to before version 12.2.0, an attacker can supply a malicious PDF that causes the process to hang indefinitely, consuming 100%… | ||||
references
External citations — patches, advisories, analysis.
- https://github.com/python-pillow/PillowPACKAGE
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/commit/3bf614e4b8615d0ce1d5039efaf6db447fe7c468WEB
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/9519WEB
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/releases/tag/12.2.0WEB
- https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/security/advisories/GHSA-r73j-pqj5-w3x7WEB
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-42310ADVISORY
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