CVE-2026-48049 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) Path Traversal vulnerability in @hapi/inert. A fix is available for @hapi/inert — see the affected versions and patch details below.
@hapi/inert: Static-file confinement bypass via sibling-prefix path
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-2026-48049.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-48049 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.
@hapi/inertnpmDescription
Impact
@hapi/inert serves static files from a directory configured with path (in the directory / file handlers) or relativeTo (for h.file()), with confinement enforced by the confine option (default true). Before the patch, the confinement check compared the resolved absolute path against the confine directory using a raw string-prefix test, so a sibling directory whose absolute path begins with the same characters as the confine directory (eg. /app/static-secret next to a served /app/static) was incorrectly accepted as confined. An unauthenticated remote attacker who knows or guesses such a sibling name can read any file inside it via a request like /..%2fstatic-secret/secret.txt, provided the file is readable by the server process. Only applications that happen to have a sibling directory sharing a string prefix with the served directory are exploitable; applications with no such sibling are unaffected.
Patches
Upgrade to 7.1.1.
Workarounds
For users who cannot upgrade immediately: ensure the directory served via inert has no sibling whose name starts with the same characters (for example, rename static-secret/ to secret/, or move it to a different parent directory).
Resources
Pull Request: https://github.com/hapijs/inert/pull/176
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | @hapi/inert | ≥ 4.0.0&&< 7.1.1 | 7.1.1npm install @hapi/inert@7.1.1 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for @hapi/inert, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update @hapi/inert to 7.1.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-48049 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Resolve every user-supplied path to its canonical form and reject anything that escapes the intended directory, and run the component under an account that has no read or write access outside the directory it legitimately serves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-48049 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.