Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity in brace-expansion - #VU166141
Published: November 12, 2026
Vulnerability identifier: #VU166141
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 8.7 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: N/A
CWE-ID: CWE-407
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service by exhausting CPU resources and blocking an application's event loop for minutes.
The vulnerability exists due to inefficient algorithmic complexity in brace-expansion's expand() function when processing untrusted patterns, including repeated scans, excessive intermediate expansion, quadratic regular expression backtracking, and unbounded visits to discarded results. A remote attacker can supply crafted brace patterns directly or through minimatch or glob to trigger excessive processing despite existing expansion limits and stall the application.
Affected software
brace-expansion
Remediation
Install security update from vendor's website.
brace-expansion - addressed in versions 1.1.22, 2.1.8, 3.0.10