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GHSA-3ppc-4f35-3m26

minimatch has a ReDoS via repeated wildcards with non-matching literal in pattern

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) High CVE-2026-26996

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
npm minimatch >= 10.0.0, < 10.2.1 10.2.1
npm minimatch >= 9.0.0, < 9.0.6 9.0.6
npm minimatch >= 8.0.0, < 8.0.5 8.0.5
npm minimatch >= 7.0.0, < 7.4.7 7.4.7
npm minimatch >= 6.0.0, < 6.2.1 6.2.1
npm minimatch >= 5.0.0, < 5.1.7 5.1.7
npm minimatch >= 4.0.0, < 4.2.4 4.2.4
npm minimatch < 3.1.3 3.1.3

Details

As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).

### Summary `minimatch` is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when a glob pattern contains many consecutive `*` wildcards followed by a literal character that doesn't appear in the test string. Each `*` compiles to a separate `[^/]*?` regex group, and when the match fails, V8's regex engine backtracks exponentially across all possible splits. The time complexity is O(4^N) where N is the number of `*` characters. With N=15, a single `minimatch()` call takes ~2 seconds. With N=34, it hangs effectively forever. ### Details _Give all details on the vulnerability. Pointing to the incriminated source code is very helpful for the maintainer._ ### PoC When minimatch compiles a glob pattern, each `*` becomes `[^/]*?` in the generated regex. For a pattern like `***************X***`: ``` /^(?!\.)[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?X[^/]*?[^/]*?[^/]*?$/ ``` When the test string doesn't contain `X`, the regex engine must try every possible way to distribute the characters across all the `[^/]*?` groups before concluding no match exists. With N groups and M characters, this is O(C(N+M, N)) — exponential. ### Impact Any application that passes user-controlled strings to `minimatch()` as the pattern argument is vulnerable to DoS. This includes: - File search/filter UIs that accept glob patterns - `.gitignore`-style filtering with user-defined rules - Build tools that accept glob configuration - Any API that exposes glob matching to untrusted input ---- Thanks to @ljharb for back-porting the fix to legacy versions of minimatch.

References

External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.