CVE-2022-0691: Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key in unshiftio/url-parse

Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key in NPM url-parse prior to 1.5.9.

Leading control characters in a URL are not stripped when passed into url-parse. This can cause input URLs to be mistakenly be interpreted as a relative URL without a hostname and protocol, while the WHATWG URL parser will trim control characters and treat it as an absolute URL.

If url-parse is used in security decisions involving the hostname / protocol, and the input URL is used in a client which uses the WHATWG URL parser, the decision may be incorrect.

This can also lead to a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability if url-parse is used to check for the javascript: protocol in URLs. See following example: js const parse = require('url-parse') const express = require('express') const app = express() const port = 3000

url = parse(\"\\bjavascript:alert(1)\")

console.log(url)

app.get('/', (req, res) => { if (url.protocol !== \"javascript:\") {res.send(\"<a href=\\'\" + url.href + \"\\'>CLICK ME!</a>\")} })

app.listen(port, () => { console.log(Example app listening on port ${port}) })

unshift.io url-parse module for NPM could allow a remote attacker to bypass security restrictions, caused by improper validation of \b (backspace) character. By sending a specially-crafted request, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to bypass hostname validation and leads to false positive in the extractProtocol() function.

— IBM