Cybersecurity
Pillow update fixes code-execution flaws in image handling
Pillow’s 13.0.0 release closed several security bugs, including an EPS-handling issue that could lead to command execution through attacker-chosen filenames, alongside separate JPEG and TIFF weaknesses.
- Pillow 13.0.0, released on 16 October, fixed CVE-2026-112900 and other security bugs.
- The EPS flaw could lead to command execution when Pillow opened a file whose name an attacker controlled and Ghostscript was installed.
- The issue affected Pillow versions 2.6.0 through 12.3.0; the maintainers called it moderate, while GitHub’s CVE record rated it 9.2 out of 10.
- OX Security, whose report drew attention to the flaws, estimated that Pillow is downloaded about 436 million times a month.
- The same release also fixed JPEG and TIFF bugs, including CVE-2026-112403 and CVE-2026-112393; the article said CISA recorded no known exploitation for the EPS flaw and a public proof of concept for the TIFF one.
Pillow’s maintainers released version 13.0.0 on 16 October and used it to close CVE-2026-112900. The flaw sat in EPS handling and only mattered on hosts that had Ghostscript installed.
The article said the attacker had to control the filename that Pillow passed along. In that setup, Ghostscript could treat the name as something to execute rather than just a path.
The bug covered Pillow from 2.6.0 to 12.3.0. The maintainers described it as moderate, while GitHub’s CVE entry gave it 9.2 out of 10.
The same release also fixed other issues in JPEG decoding and TIFF saving. The article said Anthropic used Claude to study open-source software security, and that Ada Logics manually validated CVE-2026-112403, which caused crashes rather than code execution.
A third flaw, CVE-2026-112393, had been present since 2013 and overflowed a buffer when compressed TIFF images were written to memory. The article advised upgrading to Pillow 13.0.0 and rebuilding containers, wheels or base images that still bundled older copies, while noting that Python 3.10 users would need to move to Python 3.11 or later.
Named in this story
Companies
- OX Security
- whose report drew attention to the flaws
- GitHub
- assigned the CVE record scores
- Anthropic
- used Claude to study open-source software security
- Ada Logics
- manually validated one JPEG bug
Governments and agencies
- CISA
- its analysts marked exploitation status in the CVE records
Products and systems
- Pillow
- the Python image library with the flaws
- Ghostscript
- the program Pillow called when opening EPS images
- Claude
- the model Anthropic used in that security study
How the source tells it
A mostly technical advisory that leans on security urgency, with risk framed through code-execution scenarios and severity scores.
- urgency severity labels and direct upgrade guidance
- threat framing attack paths are described through attacker-controlled filenames and command execution