CVE-2026-26996: minimatch has a ReDoS via repeated wildcards with non-matching literal in pattern

Summary minimatch is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when a glob pattern contains many consecutive wildcards followed by a literal character that doesn't appear in the test string. Each compiles to a separate [^/]? regex group, and when the match fails, V8's regex engine backtracks exponentially across all possible splits.

The time complexity is O(4^N) where N is the number of characters. With N=15, a single minimatch() call takes ~2 seconds. With N=34, it hangs effectively forever.

Details Give all details on the vulnerability. Pointing to the incriminated source code is very helpful for the maintainer.

PoC When minimatch compiles a glob pattern, each becomes [^/]? in the generated regex. For a pattern like X:

/^(?!\.)[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?X[^/]?[^/]?[^/]?$/

When the test string doesn't contain X, the regex engine must try every possible way to distribute the characters across all the [^/]? groups before concluding no match exists. With N groups and M characters, this is O(C(N+M, N)) — exponential. Impact Any application that passes user-controlled strings to minimatch() as the pattern argument is vulnerable to DoS. This includes: - File search/filter UIs that accept glob patterns - .gitignore-style filtering with user-defined rules - Build tools that accept glob configuration - Any API that exposes glob matching to untrusted input