Vulnerability · Published Oct 29, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-119189Forge: X.509 pathLenConstraint not enforced by verifyCertificateChain() for CA certificates without keyUsage
Medium 5.9
In plain English
A medium-severity improper certificate validation in forge from digitalbazaar. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 6% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Forge (also called node-forge) is a native implementation of Transport Layer Security in JavaScript. Prior to 1.4.1, node-forge enforced an X.509 CA certificate's basicConstraints.pathLenConstraint only when that certificate also carried a keyUsage extension. Exploitation requires a path-length-constrained CA without keyUsage that chains to a root trusted by the application, and an attacker who holds that CA's private key or obtains a subordinate CA certificate from it. The attacker could then construct a chain exceeding the declared path length that still passed pki.verifyCertificateChain(). Public web PKI CA certificates normally include keyUsage; private PKIs with CA certificates created without it are more likely to be affected. This issue is fixed in version 1.4.1.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu:22.04:LTS | node-node-forge | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-119189 |
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| digitalbazaar | forge | < 1.4.1 |
Weakness: CWE-295 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N