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Fencer Intel
medium 5.5

CVE-2021-28678 json

Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity in Pillow

published 5y ago modified 2mo ago also BIT-pillow-2021-28678 , EUVD-2021-0185 , GHSA-hjfx-8p6c-g7gx , PYSEC-2021-94

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.7%
EPSS 0.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 54%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in Pillow before 8.2.0. For BLP data, BlpImagePlugin did not properly check that reads (after jumping to file offsets) returned data. This could lead to a DoS where the decoder could be run a large number of times on empty data.

Patch / fix

  • pypi pillow 8.2.0
  • bitnami pillow 8.2.0
  • python pillow 8.2.0
  • pillow Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 8.1.2+dfsg-0.2

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2021-28678

  • pillow Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 5.1.0-1ubuntu0.6
  • pillow Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 7.0.0-4ubuntu0.4

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2021-28678

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • python-pillow RHEL 8 5.1.1-16.el8
  • python3-pillow RHEL 8 5.1.1-16.el8

red hat advisories RHSA-2021:4149

  • python-Pillow openSUSE Leap 15.5 7.2.0-150300.3.12.1
  • python-Pillow OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 9, OpenStack Cloud 9 5.2.0-3.8.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2024:1607-1SUSE-SU-2021:1938-1

  • python3-pillow AlmaLinux 8 5.1.1-16.el8

almalinux advisories ALSA-2021:4149

  • python-pillow Rocky Linux 8 5.1.1-16.el8

rocky linux advisories RLSA-2021:4149

  • py3-pillow Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +8 more 8.2.0-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2021-28678

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Is CVE-2021-28678 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

Check with Fencer

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-28678 updated cvss 7.5

python-pillow: Excessive looping in BLP image reader

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 python-pillow, python-pillow-qt, python-pillow-tk, python-pillow-sane
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “To mitigate this feature on Red Hat Quay keep the invoice generation feature disabled, as it is by default.”
  • Red Hat Quay 3 quay/quay-rhel8
    affected: workaround, no fix available “To mitigate this feature on Red Hat Quay keep the invoice generation feature disabled, as it is by default.”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream (v. 8) python-pillow 5.1.1-16.el8, python3-pillow 5.1.1-16.el8
    fixed: vendor fix “To mitigate this feature on Red Hat Quay keep the invoice generation feature disabled, as it is by default.” RHSA-2021:4149

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.73% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 54% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
GitHub 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
OSV 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi pillow
>=5.1.0, <8.2.0
<8.2.0
8.2.0
bitnami pillow
<8.2.0
8.2.0

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-345 Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.