Pnpm CVEs & Vulnerabilities

pnpm is a package manager. From 11.3.0 until 11.5.3, `pnpm stage download` derived a local filename from registry-controlled package name and version fields. A crafted manifest could escape the selected download directory and overwrite another reachable file. The merged fix validates both fields, derives one safe filename, and verifies the final destination before writing. This vulnerability is fixed in 11.5.3.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.2 and 11.5.3, Manifest bin object keys such as "", ".", and ".." passed pnpm's bin-name guard. When a malicious package was installed globally, later global remove, update, or add-replacement flows could re-derive those names from the installed manifest and pass path.join(globalBinDir, binName) to removeBin. For "." this targets the global bin directory; for ".." this targets its parent. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.2 and 11.5.3.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.2 and 11.5.3, pnpm can persist package-manager bootstrap metadata in the first YAML document of pnpm-lock.yaml. Before the patch, direct pnpm execution trusted an already resolved packageManagerDependencies entry when the committed env lockfile contained matching pnpm and @pnpm/exe versions. A malicious repository could therefore commit package-manager lockfile package records and snapshots that bypassed fresh package-manager resolution, then cause pnpm to install and execute bytes selected by that committed lockfile state during automatic version switching. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.2 and 11.5.3.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.2 and 11.5.3, pnpm can install configDependencies declared in pnpm-workspace.yaml before command dispatch. Before the patch, a repository could declare pacquet or @pnpm/pacquet as a config dependency and pnpm treated that repository-controlled dependency as an install-engine opt-in. During install, pnpm resolved a platform-specific @pacquet/<platform>-<arch>/pacquet binary from node_modules/.pnpm-config/<packageName> and spawned it as the developer or CI user. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.2 and 11.5.3.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.2 and 11.5.3, the generic peer-suffix normalizer also stripped parenthesized text from git, URL, tarball, file, and other opaque locators. Approval for one source string could therefore authorize a different attacker-controlled source whose locator normalized to the same value. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.2 and 11.5.3.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.2 and 11.5.3, pnpm and pacquet expanded ${ENV_VAR} placeholders from repository-controlled .npmrc and pnpm-workspace.yaml into registry request destinations and registry credentials. A malicious repository could cause dependency resolution to send victim environment secrets to an attacker-selected registry before lifecycle scripts run. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.2 and 11.5.3.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.0 and 11.4.0, `pnpm install` in non-frozen mode can accept new remote package content after detecting that the downloaded tarball does not match the integrity recorded in pnpm-lock.yaml. When a package is already locked with an integrity value, and the registry later serves different metadata and tarball content for the same package name and version, pnpm initially reports an integrity mismatch. However, plain pnpm install then performs a resolution repair, accepts the registry's new integrity, updates the lockfile, installs the new content, and exits successfully. This means the lockfile integrity check does not act as a hard stop by default. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.0 and 11.4.0, pnpm's tarball extraction worker skips integrity verification when the integrity field is absent from the lockfile resolution. If an attacker can both modify pnpm-lock.yaml to remove the integrity: field and cause the referenced registry URL to serve altered package content, pnpm install --frozen-lockfile can install the altered package without an integrity error. npm's npm ci enforces integrity by default; pnpm's behavior of silently skipping verification is a pnpm-specific fail-open gap. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.0 and 11.4.0, pnpm can send user-level unscoped npm authentication credentials to a registry chosen by a repository-local .npmrc file. In the reproduced case, the user's npm config contains a default registry and an unscoped _authToken. The repository does not provide a token-bearing auth line. It only sets registry= to a different registry URL. During normal pnpm metadata/install workflows, pnpm binds the user-origin unscoped credential to the repository-selected registry and sends it as an Authorization header. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.0 and 11.4.0, pnpm allows a transitive dependency alias from registry package metadata to contain path traversal segments. During install, pnpm later uses that alias as a filesystem path when linking dependency nodes. As a result, a registry package can cause `pnpm install --ignore-scripts` to replace paths in the current project with symlinks to attacker-controlled dependency package directories. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.0 and 11.4.0, pnpm's patch application pipeline (@pnpm/patch-package) performs no path validation on file paths extracted from .patch files. An attacker who contributes a malicious patch file via a pull request can write attacker-controlled content to or delete arbitrary files on the filesystem during pnpm install, as the user running the install. The diff --git header paths containing ../../ sequences traverse out of the package directory, and the traversal is difficult to catch in code review because patch file diff headers are opaque to most reviewers. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.34.0 and 11.4.0, pnpm passes the lockfile-controlled git resolution.commit value to git fetch without a -- separator or commit-format validation. For git dependencies fetched through the shallow-fetch path, a malicious lockfile can replace the expected 40-character commit hash with a Git option such as --upload-pack=<command>. For SSH and local transports, --upload-pack can execute the supplied command. HTTPS transports ignore --upload-pack, so the practical attack surface is primarily SSH or local git dependencies. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to 10.33.4 and 11.0.7, a malicious codeload.github.com server can serve whatever tarball it wants and pnpm will install it regardless of the lockfile. The lockfile does not store the hash of the dependencies from https://codeload.github.com. This means that if this server was compromised or a person's machine configuration was compromised, pnpm would download and install these dependencies. This vulnerability is fixed in 10.33.4 and 11.0.7.