Uncontrolled Recursion Affecting node-forge package, versions <1.4.1
Threat Intelligence
Snyk has a proof-of-concept or detailed explanation of how to exploit this vulnerability.
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
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Test your applications- Snyk IDSNYK-JS-NODEFORGE-22114200
- published1 Nov 2026
- disclosed26 Oct 2026
- creditEthan Kim, Youngjoon Kim, Arpit Jain, Mike Read
Introduced: 26 Oct 2026
NewCVE-2026-119191 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade node-forge to version 1.4.1 or higher.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Recursion in the asn1.fromDer function in lib/asn1.js. An attacker can drive CPU and memory high enough to abort the Node.js process with a small DER or PEM structure containing nested BIT STRINGs, because the default BIT STRING decode path in _fromDer() starts with an options object that omits maxDepth, so the depth check compares against undefined and never fires, and each nested BIT STRING's contents are deep-copied by asn1.create(), making memory grow quadratically with nesting depth. This triggers under default options through any API that parses DER or PEM, including pki.certificateFromPem(), pki.publicKeyFromPem(), the PKCS#7, PKCS#8, and PKCS#12 loaders, and server certificates received by the forge TLS client.
Workaround
This vulnerability can be avoided by direct callers of forge.asn1.fromDer() passing {decodeBitStrings: false}, which stops the nested decode but changes the parsed structure, so it does not help the higher-level PKI, PKCS, and TLS APIs that do not expose the option.
Note: This is a bypass of the fix for the vulnerability described in CVE-2025-66031.