What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-21538: Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in cross-spawn

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2024-11-08 · updated 2026-07-28
• Weakness: CWE-1333

Description

Versions of the package cross-spawn before 6.0.6, from 7.0.0 and before 7.0.5 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to improper input sanitization. An attacker can increase the CPU usage and crash the program by crafting a very large and well crafted string.

Affected products

• Cross-Spawn: before 7.0.5 — fixed in 7.0.5
• Npm Cross-Spawn: from 7.0.0 before 7.0.5; before 6.0.6 — fixed in 7.0.5, 6.0.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Cross-Spawn 7.0.5; Npm Cross-Spawn 7.0.5, 6.0.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/moxystudio/node-cross-spawn/commit/5ff3a07d9add449021d806e45c4168203aa833ff
• https://github.com/moxystudio/node-cross-spawn/commit/640d391fde65388548601d95abedccc12943374f
• https://github.com/moxystudio/node-cross-spawn/pull/160
• https://security.snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-8366349
• https://security.snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-CROSSSPAWN-8303230

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