CVE-2026-45623: PostCSS: Arbitrary file read and information disclosure via attacker-controlled sourceMappingURL in CSS comments
PostCSS’s PreviousMap parses the /*# sourceMappingURL=PATH */ comment from any CSS string passed to process() and dereferences PATH against the local filesystem with no scheme, allowlist, or traversal check. An attacker who controls the CSS input can cause the host process to read any file readable by Node and leak the first ~10 bytes of its content through the resulting JSON.parse SyntaxError message. The bug also yields a precise file-existence oracle and a controllable-read primitive that may be combined with large-file targets for DoS. The behaviour is triggered with PostCSS’s default options — no from, no map, no plugins required — and is therefore reachable from any pipeline that runs untrusted CSS through PostCSS (CMS themes, user-uploaded styles, browser-extension/userstyle processors, build pipelines for third-party packages, blog comment renderers, etc.).
References
- github.com/advisories/GHSA-6g55-p6wh-862q
- github.com/postcss/postcss/commit/aaec7b78b3ce2792585b4b300ef1bd5dd5b3e8ad
- github.com/postcss/postcss/commit/c64b7488d2731dfa16213739b42c34faf5a9eba3
- github.com/postcss/postcss/releases/tag/8.5.12
- github.com/postcss/postcss/security/advisories/GHSA-6g55-p6wh-862q
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-45623
Code Behaviors & Features
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