CVE-2023-44271

Publication date 3 November 2023

Last updated 19 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

An issue was discovered in Pillow before 10.0.0. It is a Denial of Service that uncontrollably allocates memory to process a given task, potentially causing a service to crash by having it run out of memory. This occurs for truetype in ImageFont when textlength in an ImageDraw instance operates on a long text argument.

Read the notes from the security team

Why is this CVE low priority?

Only consumes memory when very long strings are used as text input

Learn more about Ubuntu priority

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
pillow	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Ignored end of life, was needed
	22.04 LTS jammy	Fixed 9.0.1-1ubuntu0.2
	20.04 LTS focal	Fixed 7.0.0-4ubuntu0.8
	18.04 LTS bionic	Needs evaluation
	16.04 LTS xenial	Needs evaluation
	14.04 LTS trusty	Needs evaluation
pillow-python2	25.10 questing	Not in release
	25.04 plucky	Not in release
	24.10 oracular	Not in release
	24.04 LTS noble	Not in release
	23.10 mantic	Not in release
	23.04 lunar	Not in release
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not in release
	20.04 LTS focal	Needs evaluation
	18.04 LTS bionic	Not in release
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not in release
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not in release

Notes

mdeslaur

upstream patch adds MAX_STRING_LENGTH which defaults to 1,000,000 limit.

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
pillow	Upstream: https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/7244 Upstream: 1fe1bb4

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	7.5 · High
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

USN-6618-1
Pillow vulnerabilities
30 January 2024