Medium

Mermaid Architecture diagrams are vulnerable to prototype pollution

  • Disclosed: 06.08.2026
  • Updated: 11.10.2026 10:22

Rendering an untrusted architecture-beta diagram lets the diagram author write an arbitrary property with the value horizontal or vertical onto Object.prototype. A group id of __proto__ is accepted as a valid parent.

Impact

Any code in the same realm that reads a property of that name from an arbitrary object, or enumerates an object with bare for...in, observes the injected value (which can only be the string horizontal or vertical.

This may mean corrupted option/config defaults, bypassed truthiness checks, causing denial of service or logic corruption in the embedding application.

Because the injected value cannot be an object or function, this is not directly exploitable for remote code execution.

PoC

architecture-beta
      group mermaidPrototypePollutionMarker(cloud)[Marker]
      service a(server)[A] in __proto__
      service b(server)[B] in mermaidPrototypePollutionMarker
      a:R -- L:b

The vulnerable write was introduced in commit cb0a4703bdf01d47508bde1c08aa9a980d70bc20 and first shipped in mermaid@11.5.0. The lines are unchanged in every release since.

Patches

This has been patched by https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/commit/99af3fc35ef0a9a9c8c6314521344d67523ddccf, released in Mermaid v11.16.1

Workarounds

There are no known workarounds. Please update to a patched version.

References

Are there any links users can visit to find out more?

Affected software

Click a technology to see all vulnerabilities affecting it.

PlatformPackageVulnerable versionsFixed in
npm package mermaid >= 11.5.0, < 11.16.1 11.16.1

References

CVSS score -
CVSS vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-1321
Platform
npm
Package
mermaid
Disclosed
06.08.2026
Updated
11.10.2026 10:22

Sources and licenses

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-3rrr-jr9j-h3q3 - CC BY 4.0

Vulnerability history: mermaid

All published vulnerabilities of this package (npm package), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.

All (16) in the archive
Total entries
16
First → latest
09.2020 08.2026
Without a fix
0
Exploited in attacks
0

Severity breakdown

  • High 3
  • Medium 12
  • Low 1

Disclosures per year

  1. 2020: 1
  2. 2021: 1
  3. 2022: 2
  4. 2023: 0
  5. 2024: 1
  6. 2025: 2
  7. 2026: 9
Severity:
  1. Mermaid Architecture diagrams are vulnerable to prototype pollution this entry
    Medium CVE-2026-71437 >= 11.5.0, < 11.16.1 11.16.1
  2. High · 7.2 CVE-2021-43861 < 8.13.8 8.13.8
  3. High ghsa-w32g-5hqp-gg6q < 8.2.3 8.2.3

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