CVE-2026-53486 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.1) Path Traversal vulnerability in @xhmikosr/decompress. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2026-53486 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
decompress: Archive extraction can create files and links outside the target directory
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.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- 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-2026-53486.
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-2026-53486 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 366,526 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.
@xhmikosr/decompressnpmdecompressnpmDescription
The decompress package for Node.js extracts archives. Prior to 10.2.1 and 11.1.3, archive extraction can create files and links outside the target directory. When extracting an archive to a directory, a crafted archive can read or write files outside that directory because hardlink and symlink entries are created without checking where targets point, path containment used a string prefix comparison, and file modes failed to remove setuid, setgid, or sticky bits. This issue is fixed in @xhmikosr/decompress versions 10.2.1 and 11.1.3.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | @xhmikosr/decompress | all versions | 10.2.1 |
| 📦npm | @xhmikosr/decompress | ≥ 11.0.0&&< 11.1.3 | 11.1.3 |
| 📦npm | decompress | all versions | No fix |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for @xhmikosr/decompress. 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 @xhmikosr/decompress to 10.2.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-53486 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-2026-53486 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-2026-53486. 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.
Red Hat Build of Keycloak, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (VolSync), Red Hat Hardened Images (dotnet8.0), and the Fedora/EPEL yarnpkg packages bundle the original, unmaintained npm decompress package (version 4.2.1 or earlier), which does not receive an upstream fix for this issue. None of these components use…
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-53486 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2026-53486 across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.