CVE-2026-45617 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1333 vulnerability in liquidjs. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2026-45617 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
LiquidJS: ReDoS via Quadratic Backtracking in `strip_html` Filter Regex
Exploitation Status
Proof-of-concept exploit code exists
- CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-45617.
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-2026-45617 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 357,322 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.
liquidjsnpmDescription
LiquidJS is a Shopify/GitHub Pages compatible template engine written in pure JavaScript. In versions 10.25.7 and below, the built-in strip_html filter uses a regex containing four flawed lazy-quantified alternatives, leading to ReDoS via quadratic backtracking. When the input contains many <script, <style, or <!-- opener tokens without matching closers, the V8 regex engine performs O(N²) backtracking, blocking the Node.js event loop. A single ~350 KB request ('<script'.repeat(50000)) stalls the process for ~10 seconds; cost grows quadratically with input size. The default memoryLimit: Infinity does not bound regex CPU, and even when configured strip_html only charges str.length to the limit — the regex itself runs unbounded. A single unauthenticated request containing crafted untrusted input can cause severe event-loop blocking and CPU amplification that saturates Node.js workers while bypassing memoryLimit protections. This issue has been fixed in version 10.26.0.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | liquidjs | all versions | 10.26.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for liquidjs. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update liquidjs to 10.26.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-45617 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 pinpoints whether CVE-2026-45617 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2026-45617. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-45617 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2026-45617 across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.