CVE-2026-9496

A flaw was found in the pacote component. A remote attacker can exploit this denial of service (DoS) vulnerability by providing a specially crafted input to the addGitSha function. This malicious input triggers excessive CPU consumption due to regex replacement and string manipulation, which can lead to the process stalling or crashing.

A flaw was found in the pacote npm package. Pacote retrieves package metadata and archives from npm registries, Git repositories, and other sources. In affected versions, the addGitSha function strips Git committish information from a package specification using a regular expression that is vulnerable to inefficient backtracking. An attacker who can supply a crafted spec.rawSpec value can cause the Node.js process that calls pacote to consume excessive CPU and become unresponsive, resulting in denial of service.

Red Hat products that include pacote versions from 11.2.7 up to (but not including) 21.5.1 may be affected when Node.js workloads process package specifications through pacote or through npm operations that depend on pacote. The impact is limited to the Node.js process performing that work; host operating systems are not directly affected.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

To mitigate this limit the length of incoming package specifiers (spec.rawSpec) before they reach the resolution service. Enforce hard CPU time limits or timeouts on isolated build jobs and package resolution processes.