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National Vulnerability Database

National Vulnerability Database

NVD

National Vulnerability Database
  1. Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-40164 Detail

Description

jq is a command-line JSON processor. Before commit 0c7d133c3c7e37c00b6d46b658a02244fdd3c784, jq used MurmurHash3 with a hardcoded, publicly visible seed (0x432A9843) for all JSON object hash table operations, which allowed an attacker to precompute key collisions offline. By supplying a crafted JSON object (~100 KB) where all keys hashed to the same bucket, hash table lookups degraded from O(1) to O(n), turning any jq expression into an O(n²) operation and causing significant CPU exhaustion. This affected common jq use cases such as CI/CD pipelines, web services, and data processing scripts, and was far more practical to exploit than existing heap overflow issues since it required only a small payload. This issue has been patched in commit 0c7d133c3c7e37c00b6d46b658a02244fdd3c784.


Metrics

 
NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

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URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://github.com/jqlang/jq/commit/0c7d133c3c7e37c00b6d46b658a02244fdd3c784 GitHub, Inc.
https://github.com/jqlang/jq/security/advisories/GHSA-wwj8-gxm6-jc29 GitHub, Inc.

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-328 Use of Weak Hash GitHub, Inc.  
CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity GitHub, Inc.  

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2026-40164
NVD Published Date:
04/13/2026
NVD Last Modified:
04/13/2026
Source:
GitHub, Inc.