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HIGH

GHSA-3ppc-4f35-3m26

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

Quick fix

GHSA-3ppc-4f35-3m26 — minimatch: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

npm install minimatch@10.2.1

Details

### 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.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 10.0.0Fixed in: 10.2.1
Fixnpm install minimatch@10.2.1
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 9.0.0Fixed in: 9.0.6
Fixnpm install minimatch@9.0.6
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 8.0.0Fixed in: 8.0.5
Fixnpm install minimatch@8.0.5
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 7.0.0Fixed in: 7.4.7
Fixnpm install minimatch@7.4.7
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 6.0.0Fixed in: 6.2.1
Fixnpm install minimatch@6.2.1
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 5.0.0Fixed in: 5.1.7
Fixnpm install minimatch@5.1.7
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 4.0.0Fixed in: 4.2.4
Fixnpm install minimatch@4.2.4
npm/minimatch
Introduced in: 0Fixed in: 3.1.3
Fixnpm install minimatch@3.1.3

References