CVE-2022-25858 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-1333 vulnerability in terser. 2 public exploit references exist, so weaponization risk is real. A fix is available for terser — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-25858 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
tersernpmDescription
The package terser before 4.8.1, from 5.0.0 and before 5.14.2 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to insecure usage of regular expressions.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | terser | all versions | 4.8.1npm install terser@4.8.1 |
| 📦npm | terser | ≥ 5.0.0&&< 5.14.2 | 5.14.2npm install terser@5.14.2 |
Affected Products
terserterserResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for terser, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update terser to 4.8.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-25858 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
For OpenShift Do (odo) product terser is shipped only for using in static page generators for upstream, thus this represents no security risk.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.2 for RHEL 8 | openshift-service-mesh/prometheus-rhel8:2.2.7-7 | RHSA-2023:3645 |
| RHINT Service Registry 2.3.0 GA | terser | RHSA-2022:6835 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-25858 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.