Medium [CVE-2026-50017] Information disclosure of authentication credentials via malicious.npmrc file
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-50017 affecting Red Hat AMQ Broker 7, Red Hat Build of Keycloak, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 8.
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Summary
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. During normal pnpm operations, the user's authentication token, intended for their default registry, can be inadvertently sent to a different, potentially malicious, registry.
This could lead to the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive authentication tokens. This Moderate impact information disclosure flaw in pnpm allows an attacker to obtain user-level unscoped npm authentication credentials.
When a user runs pnpm commands in a repository with a malicious local `.npmrc` file, their authentication token, intended for their default registry, can be redirected to an attacker-controlled registry. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 6.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N).
Weakness: CWE-201.
- < 10.34.0
- < 11.4.0
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 12 days ago·verify at source
- 10.34.0
- 11.4.0
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 12 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- To mitigate this issue, ensure that all npm authentication tokens are explicitly URL-scoped rather than relying on unscoped, user-level configurations. Additionally, avoid executing pnpm commands in untrusted repositories, as a malicious `.npmrc` file can redirect authentication credentials to an attacker.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 12 days ago·verify at source
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