High severity · published Jul 23, 2026
CVE-2026-14257
brace-expansion DoS via unbounded expansion length causing an out-of-memory process crash
7.5
CVSS
0.6%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
brace-expansion through 5.0.7 is vulnerable to denial of service via memory exhaustion. The expand() function limits the number of results with a max option (default 100,000) but does not bound the length of each result string. By chaining multiple brace groups, an attacker keeps the result count under the limit while making each result progressively longer, so total memory scales with both count and string length until the process hits a fatal, uncatchable out-of-memory error. About 7.5 KB of input ('{a,b}'.repeat(1500)) crashes a default Node.js process. Any application that passes attacker-influenced strings to brace-expansion.expand() - directly or transitively via minimatch / glob brace patterns - can be crashed by a small request. Fixed in 5.0.8 by adding a maxLength option (default 4,000,000) that bounds accumulated output and intermediate arrays.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.6% · higher than 51% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
BR
brace-expansion · juliangruber
through 5.0.7 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-14257
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-14257
Product
https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion
Patch
https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion/commit/a1bd33999ea75262c4749fff3bbb0d1372bd07b5
Product
https://www.npmjs.com/package/brace-expansion
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