CVE-2026-48038

Impact

Denial of service via untrapped exception in services validating user-supplied JSON / object input with recursive link schemas.

The blast radius depends on how the application invokes joi:

• Highest impact: validate() called without try/catch in a request handler would cause an unhandled exception, potentially crashing the process.
• Lower impact: validateAsync() or validate() inside a try/catch, the validation fails, but the error type is RangeError rather than a structured ValidationError, complicating error handling.

Patches

Upgrade to version >= 18.2.1.

Workarounds

Try/catch the validation to avoid uncaught exceptions.

References

• Pull request: hapijs/joi#3113