juliangruber/brace-expansion · Security

brace-expansion: Large numeric range defeats documented `max` DoS protection

GHSA ID
GHSA-jxxr-4gwj-5jf2
CVE ID
CVE-2026-45149
Severity
medium
Published
Updated
CVSS
6.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v3
6.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Description

The max option was being applied too late:

When expanding a single large numeric range like {1..10000000}, the sequence generation loop generates all 10 million intermediate elements before the max limit is applied With max=10, the output is correctly limited to 10 items, but the process still allocates ~505 MB and spends ~800ms building the full intermediate array.

Workaround

Ensure the string to be expanded doesn't contain more values than the desired max item count.

CWEs

References