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CVE-2026-40164

Published: April 15, 2026Last modified: June 12, 2026

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.

Severity score breakdown

ParameterValue
Base score7.5
Attack VectorNETWORK
Attack complexityLOW
Privileges requiredNONE
User interactionNONE
ScopeUNCHANGED
ConfidentialityNONE
Integrity impactNONE
Availability impactHIGH
VectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Status

ProductReleasePackageStatus
Alpaquita Linux23 LTSjqFixed (1.8.1-r1)
25 LTSjqFixed (1.8.1-r2)
StreamjqFixed (1.8.1-r1)

References

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