CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2026-40192 — Pillow is a Python imaging library
Pillow is a Python imaging library. Versions 10.3.0 through 12.1.1 did not limit the amount of GZIP-compressed data read when decoding a FITS image, making them vulnerable to decompression bomb attacks. A specially crafted FITS file could cause unbounded memory consumption, leading to denial of service (OOM crash or severe performance degradation). If users are unable to immediately upgrade, they should only open specific image formats, excluding FITS, as a workaround.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 8.7 (4.0)
- Published
- 2026-04-15
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- python/pypi
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400, CWE-770, CWE-409
Affected products
- python / pillow
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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