CVE-2024-45296 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1333 vulnerability in path-to-regexp. A fix is available for path-to-regexp — see the affected versions and patch details below.
path-to-regexp outputs backtracking regular expressions
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-2024-45296.
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-2024-45296 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
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.
path-to-regexpnpmDescription
path-to-regexp turns path strings into a regular expressions. In certain cases, path-to-regexp will output a regular expression that can be exploited to cause poor performance. Because JavaScript is single threaded and regex matching runs on the main thread, poor performance will block the event loop and lead to a DoS. The bad regular expression is generated any time you have two parameters within a single segment, separated by something that is not a period (.). For users of 0.1, upgrade to 0.1.10. All other users should upgrade to 8.0.0.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | path-to-regexp | all versions | 0.1.13npm install path-to-regexp@0.1.13 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for path-to-regexp, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update path-to-regexp to 0.1.13 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-45296 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-2024-45296 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2024-45296. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery 1 for RHEL 9 | discovery/discovery-server-rhel9:1.12.0-1 | RHSA-2025:1249 |
| HawtIO 4.0.0 for Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4 | path-to-regexp | RHSA-2024:11023 |
| multicluster engine for Kubernetes 2.6 for RHEL 8 | multicluster-engine/assisted-image-service-rhel8:v2.6.4-4 | RHSA-2024:11293 |
| multicluster engine for Kubernetes 2.7 for RHEL 8 | multicluster-engine/assisted-service-8-rhel8:v2.7.2-1 | RHSA-2024:10857 |
| NETWORK-OBSERVABILITY-1.7.0-RHEL-9 | network-observability/network-observability-cli-rhel9:v1.7.0-67 | RHSA-2024:8014 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11 for RHEL 9 | rhacm2/acm-cluster-permission-rhel9:v2.11.4-4 | RHSA-2024:11381 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.12 for RHEL 9 | rhacm2/acm-cli-rhel9:v2.12.1-4 | RHSA-2024:10865 |
| Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 for RHEL 8 | automation-controller-0:4.5.13-1.el8ap | RHSA-2024:10762 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-45296 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2024-45296 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.