Skip to main content

Improperly Controlled Modification of Object Prototype Attributes ('Prototype Pollution')

CVE-2026-33672

Severity Medium
Score 5.3/10

Summary

Picomatch is a glob matcher written JavaScript. Versions prior to 2.3.2, 3.0.0 prior to 3.0.2 and 4.0.0 prior to 4.0.4, are vulnerable to a method injection vulnerability affecting the `POSIX_REGEX_SOURCE` object. Because the object inherits from `Object.prototype`, specially crafted POSIX bracket expressions (e.g., `[[:constructor:]]`) can reference inherited method names. These methods are implicitly converted to strings and injected into the generated regular expression. This leads to incorrect glob matching behavior (integrity impact), where patterns may match unintended filenames. The issue does not enable remote code execution, but it can cause security-relevant logic errors in applications that rely on glob matching for filtering, validation, or access control. All users of affected `picomatch` versions that process untrusted or user-controlled glob patterns are potentially impacted. This issue is fixed in picomatch 4.0.4, 3.0.2 and 2.3.2. Users should upgrade to one of these versions or later, depending on their supported release line. If upgrading is not immediately possible, avoid passing untrusted glob patterns to picomatch. Possible mitigations include sanitizing or rejecting untrusted glob patterns, especially those containing POSIX character classes like `[[:...:]]`; avoiding the use of POSIX bracket expressions if user input is involved; and manually patching the library by modifying `POSIX_REGEX_SOURCE` to use a null prototype.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • LOW
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE

CWE-1321 - Prototype Pollution

Prototype pollution is one of the lesser-known vulnerabilities. It allows attackers to abuse the rules of JavaScript by injecting properties into the general object “Object” in JS. Modifying the prototype of “Object” affects the behavior of all objects in the entire app, potentially resulting in denial of service, arbitrary code execution, cross-site scripting, etc.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published