Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting pillow package, versions [,6.2.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.23% (63rd percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PYTHON-PILLOW-540746
  • published6 Jan 2020
  • disclosed4 Jan 2020
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 4 Jan 2020

CVE-2019-19911  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-119  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Pillow to version 6.2.2 or higher.

Overview

Pillow is a PIL (Python Imaging Library) fork.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). FpxImagePlugin.py calls the range function on an unvalidated 32-bit integer if the number of bands is large. On Windows running 32-bit Python, this results in an OverflowError or MemoryError due to the 2 GB limit. However, on Linux running 64-bit Python this results in the process being terminated by the OOM killer.

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

CVSS Scores

version 3.1