Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-50016 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-50016 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-50016?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 8.8, published 25 June 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- pnpm (npm) SEMVER:introduced=0,fixed=10.34.0.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-50016?
- Yes. pnpm (npm): upgrade to 10.34.0 or later. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-50016 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-50016?
- Check whether you run pnpm (npm) at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
How to fix
- pnpm (npm): upgrade to 10.34.0 or later
npm install pnpm@10.34.0
Technical details
A path traversal vulnerability exists in pnpm's handling of dependency aliases within package metadata. When pnpm processes a transitive dependency that uses an 'npm:' alias containing traversal segments (e.g., '../../'), it fails to validate or normalize the path before passing it to symlink creation logic. An attacker can craft a malicious package that, when installed as a transitive dependency, escapes the 'node_modules' directory to overwrite project-local paths like '.git/hooks' or 'scripts/' with symlinks to attacker-controlled directories. This bypasses the '--ignore-scripts' security measure, as the malicious payload is executed during subsequent developer or CI/CD actions rather than during the installation itself. Patches are available in versions 10.34.0 and 11.4.0.
Affected products
- pnpm pnpm < 10.34.0, >= 11.0.0, < 11.4.0
Identifiers
- CVE-2026-50016
- GHSA-hwx4-2j3j-g496
Timeline
- 2026-05-28: advisory: Initial GitHub Advisory published.
- 2026-06-26: patched: Advisory updated with patched versions.