GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-407 vulnerability in nuxt. A fix is available for nuxt — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Nuxt: Unauthenticated CPU exhaustion parsing and hashing the Nuxt island endpoint body before hash validation
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 GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv.
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
GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv 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.
nuxtnpmDescription
Impact
The internal island renderer endpoint (/__nuxt_island/...) decodes and hashes attacker-controlled request input before it validates the URL-resident hash. An unauthenticated POST /__nuxt_island/<name>_<anything>.json with a large JSON body (for example ~4.6 MB / 150k keys) is fully read, destr-parsed, and run through ohash before the request is rejected with a 400. Because Nitro runs on a single event loop, this both wastes CPU on the doomed request and delays every concurrent request. A low request rate is enough to degrade or stall the server. No valid hash and no authentication are required.
Patches
Fixed in [email protected] and [email protected]. The island handler now enforces a raw body-size cap (413) and a JSON nesting-depth cap (400) before parsing or hashing, so oversized or deeply nested input is rejected cheaply.
Workarounds
Put a small request-body limit in front of /__nuxt_island/ at your reverse proxy / edge (islands legitimately send only a compact props payload), or disable server components if unused.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | nuxt | ≥ 4.0.0&&< 4.5.1 | 4.5.1npm install nuxt@4.5.1 |
| 📦npm | nuxt | ≥ 3.1.0&&< 3.21.10 | 3.21.10npm install nuxt@3.21.10 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for nuxt, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update nuxt to 4.5.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv 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 GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-9pgf-384g-p7mv across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.