CVE-2026-112392: Pillow: NULL dereference in ImagingExpand via rank filters on zero-size images
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NULL dereference in ImagingExpand via rank filters on zero-size images
Location: src/libImaging/Filter.c:79 in ImagingExpand()
Commit: a707c6b21c313880d0771e54965d142dd42358b6
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Applying Pillow’s median, minimum, maximum or rank filter to an image with zero width or zero height crashes the whole Python process instead of raising an error. Empty images like this are easy to produce with ordinary calls, for example a crop box whose left and right edges (or top and bottom edges) are equal, or the second page of a crafted multi-page image file. An attacker who can supply crop coordinates or an uploaded file to an application that runs one of these filters can kill its worker process. The effect is a crash only, with no memory disclosure or corruption.
The fault is in ImagingExpand() in src/libImaging/Filter.c. This is the edge-padding step that RankFilter.filter() always runs through the core expand() method, so MedianFilter, MinFilter and MaxFilter go through it too. It fills the margin by copying the input’s edge pixels, reading imIn->image[y][0] and rows 0 / ysize-1, and never checks that the input has any pixels. For an empty image, ImagingAllocateArray leaves the line pointers NULL, so the first read dereferences NULL and the process dies with SIGSEGV, in every mode.
Zero-size images reach this point through public API alone:
Image.crop(),ImageOps.crop()andImage.new();- a multi-page TIFF opened by path whose second IFD declares
ImageLength = 0, on whichseek(1)andload()succeed.
Every other ImageFilter returns an empty image for the same inputs. The zero-height case has crashed since the original PIL import, and the zero-width case since Pillow 4.3.0. This is separate from the margin == 0 fix in #9755: the path is the same, but here the degenerate value is the image size rather than the kernel size. It has the same shape as the zero-dimension ImagingOffset crash fixed under GHSA-f87v-9578-p47w.
The attached reproducer shows a one-pixel-wide control crop filtering normally, while four empty crops passed through the rank filters are each killed by SIGSEGV. A patch that returns early in ImagingExpand for empty input is included.
References
Code Behaviors & Features
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