Vulnerability · Published Jan 26, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2026-23889pnpm has Windows-specific tarball Path Traversal

Medium 6.5

In plain English

A medium-severity path traversal in pnpm from pnpm. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 42% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)6.5Medium

Exploit odds (30 days)0.5%top 58.2% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: poc

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to version 10.28.1, a path traversal vulnerability in pnpm's tarball extraction allows malicious packages to write files outside the package directory on Windows. The path normalization only checks for `./` but not `.\`. On Windows, backslashes are directory separators, enabling path traversal. This vulnerability is Windows-only. This issue impacts Windows pnpm users and Windows CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions Windows runners, Azure DevOps). It can lead to overwriting `.npmrc`, build configs, or other files. Version 10.28.1 contains a patch.

Affected packages & fixed versions

Ecosystem	Package	Fixed in	Advisory
Alpine:v3.23	pnpm	10.33.4-r0	ALPINE-CVE-2026-23889
npm	pnpm	10.28.1	GHSA-6x96-7vc8-cm3p

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
pnpm	pnpm	< 10.28.1

Weakness: CWE-22 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

References

https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/security/advisories/GHSA-6x96-7vc8-cm3p x_refsource_CONFIRM
https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/commit/6ca07ffbe6fc0e8b8cdc968f228903ba0886f7c0 x_refsource_MISC
https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/releases/tag/v10.28.1 x_refsource_MISC