CVE-2026-10796

Description

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.

Predictions

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

References

• https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/commit/6d870d182cd5333647ffa16c0d7dbcd817ec27a8
• https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/commit/70fb4ede6b9731d75d86451d48caa5faffbec21c
• https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/commit/90bb88748ba6c29c2cec73b18ed7057413aef308
• https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/security/advisories/GHSA-3c52-35h2-gfmm

CWEs

CWE-78