GHSA-m449-cwjh-6pw7Medium

pypdf's LZWDecode streams be manipulated to exhaust RAM

Published
November 24, 2025
Last Modified
January 21, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

Impact

An attacker who uses this vulnerability can craft a PDF which leads to a memory usage of up to 1 GB per stream. This requires parsing the content stream of a page using the LZWDecode filter.

This is a follow up to GHSA-jfx9-29x2-rv3j to align the default limit with the one for zlib.

Patches

This has been fixed in pypdf==6.4.0.

Workarounds

If users cannot upgrade yet, use the line below to overwrite the default in their code:

pypdf.filters.LZW_MAX_OUTPUT_LENGTH = 75_000_000

🎯 Affected products1

  • pip/pypdf:< 6.4.0

🔗 References (7)