CVE-2026-105668: high-severity vulnerability in hexpm hex
Hex release-age cooldown is lifted package-wide when the locked release is retired
Published · Updated
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.1epss 0.4%
Protection Mechanism Failure vulnerability in hexpm hex allows the owner of a package, or an attacker who has taken over the owner's account, to get a newly published release past the release-age cooldown.
The cooldown (cooldown config, HEX_COOLDOWN) withholds versions younger than the configured age during dependency resolution. When the release of a package locked in mix.lock is retired or has a security advisory, Hex.RemoteConverger.build_cooldown_bypass/3 and Hex.RemoteConverger.unsafe_lock_bypass/1 lift the cooldown for every version of that package and of every package the locked release depends on, so that mix deps.update can move off the unsafe release. Retiring a release needs the same package owner permission as publishing one. An attacker who publishes a malicious release can retire the currently locked release, and the next mix deps.update that unlocks the package selects the new release regardless of its age. Hex.Registry.Cooldown.versions/2 checks the bypass by package name alone, so the bypass also covers packages with the same name in other repositories. Cooldown configured through an organization dependency policy is not affected.
This issue affects hex: from 2.5.0 before 2.5.2.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:H/UI:A/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
hexpm · hexRelated CVEs — hexpm hex
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-21619LOWUnsafe Deserialization of Erlang Terms in hex_coreEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-105274LOWhex_core decompresses registry and Erlang term API responses without size limitsEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-96612HIGHPath traversal in Hex via unvalidated dependency app namesEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-81856LOWTerminal escape sequence injection in Hex via unneutralized server-supplied outputEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-96618LOWHex exhausts memory and disk on oversized or compressed responses from an untrusted mirrorEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-96596MEDIUMerl_tar:extract/2 loops forever on a GNU sparse member with a trailing holeEPSS 0.2%
References
https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-105668.htmlhttps://github.com/hexpm/hex/commit/1b6fddfeadd98ed26a143f60356efade0494e2aehttps://github.com/hexpm/hex/commit/b4e665d46be8a5f81e8cbbe4c3a67058a19cf133https://github.com/hexpm/hex/commit/eed2bdf85320ae9e244629511c03f5f3f8c5d0b5https://github.com/hexpm/hex/security/advisories/GHSA-pqhp-5x9x-69h7https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-105668