Security releases available

Updates are now available for the 18.x, 20.x, 21.x Node.js release lines for the following issues.

Command injection via args parameter of child_process.spawn without shell option enabled on Windows (CVE-2024-27980) - (HIGH)

Due to the improper handling of batch files in child_process.spawn / child_process.spawnSync, a malicious command line argument can inject arbitrary commands and achieve code execution even if the shell option is not enabled.

It is important to note that there has been a breaking change for Windows users who utilize child_process.spawn and child_process.spawnSync. Node.js will now error with EINVAL if a .bat or .cmd file is passed to child_process.spawn and child_process.spawnSync without the shell option set. If the input to spawn/spawnSync is sanitized, users can now pass { shell: true } as an option to prevent the occurrence of EINVALs errors.

While it is possible to also pass --security-revert=CVE-2024-27980 to revert the security patch, we strongly advise against doing so. Impact:

• This vulnerability affects all Windows users in active release lines: 18.x, 20.x, 21.x

Thank you, to ryotak for reporting this vulnerability and thank you Ben Noordhuis for fixing it.

Summary

The Node.js project will release new versions of the 18.x, 20.x, 21.x releases lines on or shortly after, Tuesday, April 9, 2024 in order to address:

• 1 high severity issues.

Impact

The 18.x release line of Node.js is vulnerable to 1 high severity issue. The 20.x release line of Node.js is vulnerable to 1 high severity issue. The 21.x release line of Node.js is vulnerable to 1 high severity issue.

Release timing

Releases will be available on, or shortly after, Tuesday, April 9, 2024.

The current Node.js security policy can be found at https://nodejs.org/en/security/. Please follow the process outlined in https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/SECURITY.md if you wish to report a vulnerability in Node.js.

Subscribe to the low-volume announcement-only nodejs-sec mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nodejs-sec to stay up to date on security vulnerabilities and security-related releases of Node.js and the projects maintained in the nodejs GitHub organization.