GHSA-ffmh-x56j-9rc3 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1333 vulnerability in jquery-validation. A fix is available for jquery-validation — see the affected versions and patch details below.
jquery-validation Regular Expression Denial of Service due to arbitrary input to url2 method
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-ffmh-x56j-9rc3.
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-ffmh-x56j-9rc3 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 378,156 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.
jquery-validationnpmDescription
The jQuery Validation Plugin (jquery-validation) provides drop-in validation for forms. Versions of jquery-validation prior to 1.19.5 are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) when an attacker is able to supply arbitrary input to the url2 method. This is due to an incomplete fix for CVE-2021-43306. Users should upgrade to version 1.19.5 to receive a patch.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | jquery-validation | all versions | 1.19.5npm install jquery-validation@1.19.5 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for jquery-validation, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update jquery-validation to 1.19.5 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-ffmh-x56j-9rc3 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-ffmh-x56j-9rc3 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-ffmh-x56j-9rc3. 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-ffmh-x56j-9rc3 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-ffmh-x56j-9rc3 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.