| Package | Affected versions | Patched versions |
|---|---|---|
| minimatch | ≥ 10.0.0, < 10.2.1≥ 3.0.0, < 3.1.3≥ 4.0.0, < 4.2.4≥ 5.0.0, < 5.1.7≥ 6.0.0, < 6.2.1≥ 7.0.0, < 7.4.7≥ 8.0.0, < 8.0.5≥ 9.0.0, < 9.0.6 | 10.2.13.1.34.2.45.1.76.2.17.4.78.0.59.0.6 |
| minimatch | ≥ 10.0.0, < 10.2.1≥ 4.0.0, < 4.2.4≥ 5.0.0, < 5.1.7≥ 6.0.0, < 6.2.1≥ 7.0.0, < 7.4.7≥ 8.0.0, < 8.0.5≥ 9.0.0, < 9.0.6< 3.1.3 | 10.2.14.2.45.1.76.2.17.4.78.0.59.0.63.1.3 |
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.
Give all details on the vulnerability. Pointing to the incriminated source code is very helpful for the maintainer.
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.
Any application that passes user-controlled strings to minimatch() as the pattern argument is vulnerable to DoS. This includes:
.gitignore-style filtering with user-defined rulesThanks to @ljharb for back-porting the fix to legacy versions of minimatch.
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