CVE-2026-10796
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk38th percentile - higher than 38% of all known CVEs
Summary
nvm (Node Version Manager) through 0.40.4 executes arbitrary commands from version strings supplied by the configured Node.js/io.js mirror. An attacker who controls the mirror or performs a man-in-the-middle attack on a non-TLS connection can run arbitrary commands on the victim's system.
Risk Assessment
An attacker can take over a developer or CI system, leading to full compromise including data theft and backdoor installation.
Recommendation
Update nvm to the latest master branch version (or wait for the official release) and use only the default HTTPS mirror (https://nodejs.org).
Other vulnerabilities in nvm
See all- CVE-2026-118905High
In nvm versions 0.31.2 through 0.40.5, nvm_ls filters installed versions with a sed program that embeds the requested version pattern in a \#...# address, escaping . and # but not backslash. A version string containing # closes the address early and the rest is parsed as sed commands, allowing shell command execution with GNU sed or file read/write with BSD sed.
- CVE-2026-94185Medium
nvm before 0.40.8 is vulnerable to path traversal in nvm_alias(), where a requested version or alias is treated as a filename under $NVM_DIR/alias without containment checks. A name containing '..' allows reading the first non-comment line of any file readable by the user, e.g. via .nvmrc in an untrusted repository. There is no integrity or availability impact and no code execution.
- CVE-2026-15921Low
Node Version Manager (nvm) versions 0.32.1 through 0.40.5 are vulnerable to path traversal when parsing LTS codenames from a mirror. A malicious mirror can inject path sequences like "../../../.bashrc", causing nvm to write version strings outside the intended alias directory, potentially overwriting shell startup files.
Original NVD description (English source)
nvm (Node Version Manager) through 0.40.4 executes arbitrary commands from version strings supplied by the configured Node.js/io.js mirror. Commands such as `nvm install` read the available versions from the mirror's index.tab and use the selected version, without sanitization, to build download URLs and shell/awk commands. Two sinks are affected by the same untrusted input: nvm_download() built a curl/wget command string and ran it with `eval`, so a version field containing command substitution (for example $(id)) was executed by the local shell; and nvm_get_checksum() interpolated the version-derived download slug into an awk program, so a crafted version could execute arbitrary commands via awk's system(). An attacker who controls the configured mirror, supplies mirror content to a user or CI on a non-default mirror, or machine-in-the-middles a non-TLS mirror can ∴ run arbitrary commands with the privileges of the user running nvm. The default mirror (https://nodejs.org over TLS) is not affected. Fixed on master (pending the next tagged release) by passing every argument as a literal argv element instead of using eval, by passing the value to awk as data via -v instead of interpolating it into the program, and by rejecting any version outside the Node.js/io.js version grammar before it is used.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

