CVE-2022-39382: NODE_ENV in Keystone defaults to development with esbuild

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2022-11-03 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-74

Description

Keystone is a headless CMS for Node.js — built with GraphQL and React.`@keystone-6/core@3.0.0 || 3.0.1` users that use `NODE_ENV` to trigger security-sensitive functionality in their production builds are vulnerable to `NODE_ENV` being inlined to `"development"` for user code, irrespective of what your environment variables. If you do not use `NODE_ENV` in your user code to trigger security-sensitive functionality, you are not impacted by this vulnerability. Any dependencies that use `NODE_ENV` to trigger particular behaviors (optimizations, security or otherwise) should still respect your environment's configured `NODE_ENV` variable. The application's dependencies, as found in `node_modules` (including `@keystone-6/core`), are typically not compiled as part of this process, and thus should be unaffected. We have tested this assumption by verifying that `NODE_ENV=production yarn keystone start` still uses secure cookies when using `statelessSessions`. This vulnerability has been fixed in @keystone-6/core@3.0.2, regression tests have been added for this vulnerability in #8063.

Affected products

keystonejs keystone: 3.0.0, 3.0.1

References

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