Affected: python-pillow Pillow

Pillow is a Python imaging library. From 5.1.0 until 13.0.0, Pillow can enter an infinite loop while rewriting PDF pages. PdfParser.rewrite_pages() follows Parent relationships without detecting a cycle in the page tree. An attacker can supply a cyclic PDF to an application that appends an image to that PDF. This can hold the worker at full CPU and deny service. This issue is fixed in version 13.0.0.

Affected: PyPI: Pillow

``` ============================================================================ Infinite loop in PdfParser.rewrite_pages on page tree Parent cycle Location: src/PIL/PdfParser.py:505 in PdfParser.rewrite_pages() Commit: a707c6b21c313880d0771e54965d142dd42358b6 ============================================================================ ```

A PDF file of a few hundred bytes makes Pillow hang forever, holding one processor core at 100%, when an application tries to append an image to it. Anyone who can supply the existing PDF to an application that calls `im.save(fp, "PDF", append=True)` (or `save_all=True, append=True`) can tie up that worker indefinitely. Memory use stays flat, so only an external timeout stops it.

The bug is in `PdfParser.rewrite_pages()` in `src/PIL/PdfParser.py` (the `while pages_tree_node_ref:` loop at line 505). For each original page, it walks the `/Parent` chain upward and stops only when it reaches a node with no `/Parent`. It keeps no record of nodes it has already visited, so a loop in that chain never ends. The simplest case is a `/Pages` root that lists itself as its own `/Parent`; a longer cycle among page-tree nodes behaves the same way. The path is `PdfImagePlugin._save()` → `write_catalog()` → `rewrite_pages()`, and it is reached whether the save target is a file path or a `BytesIO`. Plain `Image.open()` pipelines are not affected, because Pillow only parses PDFs on the append path.

This is a sibling of CVE-2026-42310 (the cyclic traile…