Researchers have discovered that CVE-2026-111497, a high-severity security bug in Google’s Brotli compression library, can be triggered by crafted files to allow unauthenticated remote code execution in software beyond web servers. JFrog reported that it reproduced control of the instruction pointer in FFmpeg using a malicious JPEG XL file and identified other potential attack paths in Apache Arrow, ClickHouse, and .NET. To assist with detection, JFrog released an open-source “Brotli2Shell” scanner.
The vulnerability, which carries a CVSS score of 9.2, was first disclosed following red-teaming exercises by OpenAI that highlighted risks in runtimes like Node.js and Bun. Although a fix for the underlying issue was committed to the Brotli source code in February 2026, the library did not ship a public release containing the patch until October. Semgrep previously found that the flaw affects 433 package entries across 12 ecosystems, noting that about 71% of those packages still lacked available fixes.
