# CVE-2026-14257: brace-expansion DoS via unbounded expansion length causing an out-of-memory process crash

> CVE-2026-14257: brace-expansion DoS via unbounded expansion length causing an out-of-memory process crash. CVSS 7.5 (CVSS 3.1).

Canonical: https://rewindex.com/cve/CVE-2026-14257
Last updated: 2026-10-24T13:10:00Z

- Published: 2026-07-23 12:54 UTC · Updated: 2026-10-24 13:10 UTC · Assigner: seal
- CVSS: 7.5 (CVSS 3.1) · Severity: High · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- EPSS: 0.64%, 51th percentile (scored 2026-10-25)
- CISA KEV: no
- CWE: CWE-400, CWE-770

## 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.

## Affected vendors and products

- juliangruber: brace-expansion

## Tracked companies

- [Bitbucket](https://rewindex.com/company/bitbucket.md)
- [Jira](https://rewindex.com/company/jira.md)

## References

- [CVE record on cve.org](https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-14257)
- [NVD entry](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-14257)
- [https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion](https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion)
- [https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion/commit/a1bd33999ea75262c4749fff3bbb0d1372bd07b5](https://github.com/juliangruber/brace-expansion/commit/a1bd33999ea75262c4749fff3bbb0d1372bd07b5)
- [https://www.npmjs.com/package/brace-expansion](https://www.npmjs.com/package/brace-expansion)

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_Sources: CVE records from the CVE Program (cve.org). CVE® is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. (https://www.cve.org/) This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. (https://nvd.nist.gov/) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog from CISA. (https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog) EPSS scores from FIRST (Exploit Prediction Scoring System). (https://www.first.org/epss/)_


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Canonical: https://rewindex.com/cve/CVE-2026-14257 · Markdown: https://rewindex.com/cve/CVE-2026-14257.md · JSON: https://rewindex.com/api/v1/cves/CVE-2026-14257 · Data licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) · Generated 2026-10-26T03:13:31.969Z