Vulnerability · Published May 29, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-45149brace-expansion: Large numeric range defeats documented `max` DoS protection
Medium 6.5
In plain English
A medium-severity uncontrolled resource consumption in brace-expansion from juliangruber. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 23% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.
Official description
The brace-expansion library generates arbitrary strings containing a common prefix and suffix. From 5.0.0 to before 5.0.6, the max option was being applied too late. When expanding a single large numeric range like {1..10000000}, the sequence generation loop generates all 10 million intermediate elements before the max limit is applied With max=10, the output is correctly limited to 10 items, but the process still allocates ~505 MB and spends ~800ms building the full intermediate array. This vulnerability is fixed in 5.0.6.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian:12 | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Debian:13 | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Debian:14 | node-brace-expansion | 2.0.3+~1.1.2-3 | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Ubuntu:22.04:LTS | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Ubuntu:24.04:LTS | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Ubuntu:25.10 | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-45149 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | node-brace-expansion | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-45149 |
| npm | brace-expansion | 5.0.6 | GHSA-jxxr-4gwj-5jf2 |
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| juliangruber | brace-expansion | >= 5.0.0, < 5.0.6 |
Weakness: CWE-400 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H