CVE-2024-4068 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1050 vulnerability in braces. A fix is available for braces — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Memory Exhaustion in braces
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-4068.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2024-4068 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
bracesReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects npm packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
The NPM package braces, versions prior to 3.0.3, fails to limit the number of characters it can handle, which could lead to Memory Exhaustion. In lib/parse.js, if a malicious user sends "imbalanced braces" as input, the parsing will enter a loop, which will cause the program to start allocating heap memory without freeing it at any moment of the loop. Eventually, the JavaScript heap limit is reached, and the program will crash.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | braces | all versions | 3.0.3npm install braces@3.0.3 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for braces, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update braces to 3.0.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-4068 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2024-4068 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2024-4068. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
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.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| HawtIO 4.0.0 for Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4 | see advisory | RHSA-2024:11023 |
| multicluster engine for Kubernetes 2.4 for RHEL 8 | multicluster-engine/console-mce-rhel8:v2.4.5-25 | RHBA-2024:3555 |
| multicluster engine for Kubernetes 2.5 for RHEL 9 | multicluster-engine/console-mce-rhel9:v2.5.5-1 | RHBA-2024:4458 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.10 for RHEL 9 | rhacm2/console-rhel9:v2.10.4-13 | RHSA-2024:4464 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.9 for RHEL 8 | rhacm2/console-rhel8:v2.9.4-22 | RHBA-2024:3593 |
| Red Hat Developer Hub 1.3 on RHEL 9 | rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1.3-100 | RHBA-2024:7523 |
| Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.4 for RHEL 8 | eap7-hal-console-0:3.3.24-1.Final_redhat_00001.1.el8eap | RHSA-2024:8076 |
| Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.4 for RHEL 9 | eap7-hal-console-0:3.3.24-1.Final_redhat_00001.1.el9eap | RHSA-2024:8077 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-4068 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2024-4068 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.