Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting pillow package, versions [,3.1.1)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
7.29% (95th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PYTHON-PILLOW-40384
  • published23 Feb 2016
  • disclosed23 Feb 2016
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 23 Feb 2016

CVE-2016-2533  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

Overview

pillow is a Python Imaging Library (Fork).

Buffer overflow in the ImagingPcdDecode function in PcdDecode.c in Pillow before 3.1.1 and Python Imaging Library (PIL) 1.1.7 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a crafted PhotoCD file.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

References

CVSS Scores

version 3.1