REDHAT-BUG-2506433: High severity npm/brace-expansion vulnerability

Published Jul 23, 2026
·
Updated

brace-expansion through 5.0.7 is vulnerable to denial of service via memory exhaustion. The expand() function limits the number of results with a max option (default 100,000) but does not bound the length of each result string. By chaining multiple brace groups, an attacker keeps the result count under the limit while making each result progressively longer, so total memory scales with both count and string length until the process hits a fatal, uncatchable out-of-memory error. About 7.5 KB of input ('{a,b}'.repeat(1500)) crashes a default Node.js process. Any application that passes attacker-influenced strings to brace-expansion.expand() - directly or transitively via minimatch / glob brace patterns - can be crashed by a small request. Fixed in 5.0.8 by adding a maxLength option (default 4,000,000) that bounds accumulated output and intermediate arrays.

Affected Software

1 affected component
npm/brace-expansion<=5.0.7

Remediation

Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.

  1. Upgrade

    Upgrade brace-expansion to a version that resolves this vulnerability.

    Fixed in 5.0.8
  2. Configuration

    When calling brace-expansion.expand() (including via minimatch/glob brace patterns), set the maxLength option to limit accumulated output and intermediate arrays to prevent fatal out-of-memory crashes (default in 5.0.8 is 4,000,000).

    brace-expansion.expand() maxLength = 4000000

Event History

Jul 23, 2026
Data Sourced
via Red Hat·02:01 PM
DescriptionSeverityAffected Software

Contact

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