High severity · published May 29, 2026
CVE-2026-45149
brace-expansion: Large numeric range defeats documented `max` DoS protection
7.5
CVSS
0.3%
EPSS
No
On KEV
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.
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)0.3% · higher than 23% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
BR
brace-expansion · juliangruber
>= 5.0.0, < 5.0.6 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-45149
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-45149
Mitigation
https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion/security/advisories/GHSA-jxxr-4gwj-5jf2
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