Threats tagged 'brew-aider-cve-2026-112401'

``` ============================================================================ Quadratic GIF comment concatenation allows DoS in Image.open() Location: src/PIL/GifImagePlugin.py:266 in GifImageFile._seek() Commit: a707c6b21c313880d0771e54965d142dd42358b6 ============================================================================ ``` Opening a crafted GIF file with `Image.open()` takes time that grows with the square of the file's size, so anyone who can submit an image to a service that uses Pillow can keep one worker busy at full processor load for a long time with a small file. A 2 MB file takes about 5 seconds to open, a 4 MB file about 35 seconds, and an 8 MB file about 3 minutes. An ordinary GIF of the same size opens in well under a second. The cost is paid inside `Image.open()` itself, with default settings, before the application has seen the image's size or format. The bug is in `GifImageFile._seek()` in `src/PIL/GifImagePlugin.py`, which builds `info["comment"]` by appending to an immutable `bytes` object with no size limit. It appends once per 255-byte sub-block (`comment += block`, line 261) and once per comment extension (`info["comment"] += b"\n" + comment`, line 266). Each append copies everything collected so far. A file made of many tiny comment extensions forces a full re-copy for each one. Because `_open()` ends with `self._seek(0)`, any code that only opens an uploaded file to identify it, read its dimensions, or make a thumbnail pays the full cost. The decompression-bomb check does not help, since the image is 1×1. Memory use stays linear, so the effect is processor exhaustion and latency, bounded by whatever upload size the service allows (about 1 second at 1 MB). This is the same kind of issue as the EPS open-phase slowdown fixed as CVE-2021-28677, here in the GIF comment handling. The quadratic pattern was introduced in commit b2b737b68b06 ("Allow arbitrary number of comment extension subblocks", November 2018) and has shipped since Pillow 5.4.0. The attached script builds 2 MB and 4 MB test files and compares each against a byte-identical control whose extensions are labelled as plain text instead of comment. The 4 MB comment file took about 34 seconds to open, against 0.26 seconds for its control. A patch that collects the pieces in a list and joins them once is also attached. ## Details `GifImageFile._seek()` collects GIF comment extensions into `info["comment"]` using `bytes` concatenation, once per 255-byte sub-block and once per comment extension, with no limit on the total. `bytes` is immutable, so every `+=` allocates a new object and copies everything accumulated so far; the work done by `Image.open()` is therefore quadratic in the amount of comment data in frame 0. A 1×1 GIF89a whose body is nothing but the 5-byte comment extension `21 FE 01 41 00` repeated makes this directly observable. `Image.open(BytesIO(data))` on such a file, stock build at this commit, 2-CPU machine: | file size | comment extensions (`21 FE …`) | same bytes labelled plain-text extension (`21 01 …`) | |---|---|---| | 1 MB | 1.2 s | 0.09 s | | 2 MB | 4.9 s | 0.13 s | | 4 MB | 35 s | 0.26 s | | 8 MB | 183 s | — | The control column is the identical byte stream with the extension label changed from `0xFE` to `0x01`; it goes through the same loop and the same `self.data()` reads but is discarded instead of concatenated, and scales linearly. No `load()` is needed and no warning or exception is raised; `im.info["comment"]` simply ends up holding the multi-megabyte blob. The code, `src/PIL/GifImagePlugin.py:229-281` (trimmed): ```python elif s == b"!": s = self.fp.read(1) block = self.data() … elif s[0] == 254: # # comment extension # comment = b"" # Read this comment block while block: comment += block # :261 one copy per sub-block block = self.data() if "comment" in info: # If multiple comment blocks in frame, separate with \n info["comment"] += b"\n" + comment # :266 one copy per extension else: info["comment"] = comment s = b"" continue … while self.data(): # every other extension: read and drop pass ``` `self.data()` (`:97-102`) reads one length byte and then that many bytes, so each call is cheap and bounded; the cost is entirely in the two `+=` lines. For a single comment extension of N bytes delivered as N/255 sub-blocks, line 261 copies about N²/510 bytes in total (4 MB → 2.3 s, 8 MB → 9.5 s, 16 MB → 38 s measured). Splitting the same data into many small comment extensions is worse, becaus