CVE-2026-14257
Description
A flaw was found in brace-expansion. A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by providing specially crafted input to the expand() function, which can lead to excessive memory consumption. This can cause a denial of service (DoS) by crashing the application due to an out-of-memory error.
Statement
A flaw was found in the brace-expansion npm package. The expand() function limits the number of generated results but does not bound the length of each result string. By chaining multiple brace groups, an attacker can keep the result count under the limit while making each result progressively longer, causing total memory consumption to grow until the Node.js process crashes with an uncatchable out-of-memory error. This affects any application that passes attacker-influenced strings to brace-expansion directly or transitively via minimatch or glob brace patterns.
Note: In the majority of Red Hat products, brace-expansion is brought in as a transitive dependency of minimatch or glob and is not used at runtime. It is typically only invoked during build or development tooling and is not directly exposed to untrusted network input, reducing the practical exploitability of this flaw.
$ npm ls --omit=dev brace-expansion
npm@10.9.8 /usr/lib/node_modules/npm
`-- minimatch@9.0.9
`-- brace-expansion@2.0.2
Mitigation
Do not pass untrusted or user-controlled input to brace-expansion's expand() function or to libraries that use it for glob pattern matching (such as minimatch or glob). Validate and sanitize any brace patterns before expansion.
Where possible, upgrade to brace-expansion 1.1.17, 2.1.3, 3.0.3, or 5.0.8 which add a maxLength option that bounds accumulated output.
As an additional defense-in-depth measure, enforce memory limits on Node.js processes using operating system resource controls such as cgroups or Kubernetes resource limits (spec.containers[].resources.limits.memory) to prevent a single process from exhausting system memory and causing a wider outage.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 7.5 | N/A | 7.5 |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | None | N/A | None |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | None | N/A | None |
| Integrity Impact | None | N/A | None |
| Availability Impact | High | N/A | High |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Availability
Technical Impact: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory); DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
When allocating resources without limits, an attacker could prevent other systems, applications, or processes from accessing the same type of resource. It can be easy for an attacker to consume many resources by rapidly making many requests or causing larger resources to be used than is needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not sure what something means? Check out our Security Glossary.
Want to get errata notifications? Sign up here.
