Vulnerability · Published Oct 29, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2026-118779Forge: Regular expression denial of service in PEM decoding (pem.decode)

High 7.5

In plain English

A high-severity uncontrolled resource consumption in forge from digitalbazaar. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.6% (higher than 47% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)7.5High
Exploit odds (30 days)0.6%top 53.4% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: poc
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Forge (also called node-forge) is a native implementation of Transport Layer Security in JavaScript. Prior to 1.4.1, the affected implementation used pem.decode(), lib/pem.js, missing END line to process the relevant input or security decision. node-forge used polynomial-time regular expressions in pem.decode(), including when searching for a matching END line and parsing encapsulated headers. An unauthenticated attacker able to supply PEM input to any high-level parser could consume excessive CPU with a long malformed message and cause denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 1.4.1.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu:22.04:LTSnode-node-forgeno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2026-118779
npmnode-forge1.4.1GHSA-7wch-p9px-956x

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
digitalbazaar forge < 1.4.1

Weakness: CWE-400, CWE-1333 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References