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@renovate renovate bot commented Oct 21, 2025

This PR contains the following updates:

Package Change Age Adoption Passing Confidence
koa (source) 3.0.1 -> 3.0.3 age adoption passing confidence

GitHub Vulnerability Alerts

CVE-2025-62595

Summary:

A bypass was discovered in the Koa.js framework affecting its back redirect functionality. In certain circumstances, an attacker can manipulate the Referer header to force a user’s browser to navigate to an external, potentially malicious website. This occurs because the implementation incorrectly treats some specially crafted URLs as safe relative paths. Exploiting this vulnerability could allow attackers to perform phishing, social engineering, or other redirect-based attacks on users of affected applications.

This vulnerability affects the code referenced in GitHub Advisory GHSA-jgmv-j7ww-jx2x (which is tracked as CVE‑2025‑54420).

Details:

The patched code attempts to treat values that startWith('/') as safe relative paths and only perform origin checks for absolute URLs. However, protocol‑relative URLs (those beginning with //host) also start with '/' and therefore match the startsWith('/') branch. A protocol‑relative referrer such as //evil.com with trailing double-slash is treated by the implementation as a safe relative path, but browsers interpret Location: //evil.com as a redirect to https://evil.com (or http:// based on context).
This discrepancy allows an attacker to supply Referer: //evil.com and trigger an external redirect - bypassing the intended same‑origin protection.

Proof of concept (PoC):

Affected line of code: https://github.com/koajs/koa/blob/master/lib/response.js#L326
The problematic logic looks like:

3

Request with a protocol‑relative Referer:
curl -i -H "Referer: //haymiz.dev" http://127.0.0.1:3000/test

1

Vulnerable response will contain:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: //haymiz.dev

A browser receiving that Location header navigates to https://haymiz.dev (or http:// depending on context), resulting in an open redirect to an attacker‑controlled host:

2

Recommendation / Patch:

  • Do not treat //host as a safe relative path. Explicitly exclude protocol‑relative values from any relative‑path branch.
  • Normalize the Referer by resolving it with a base (e.g., new URL(rawRef, ctx.href)), then compare resolved.origin (scheme+host+port) to ctx.origin (or ctx.host plus scheme/port) before allowing the redirect.

Impact:

An attacker who can cause a victim to visit a specially crafted link (or inject a request with a controlled Referer) can cause the victim to be redirected to an attacker‑controlled domain. This can be used for phishing, social engineering, or to bypass some protection rules that rely on same‑origin navigation.


Release Notes

koajs/koa (koa)

v3.0.3

Compare Source

What's Changed

Full Changelog: koajs/koa@v3.0.2...v3.0.3

v3.0.2

Compare Source

What's Changed

New Contributors

Full Changelog: koajs/koa@v3.0.1...v3.0.2


Configuration

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This PR was generated by Mend Renovate. View the repository job log.

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changeset-bot bot commented Oct 21, 2025

⚠️ No Changeset found

Latest commit: cd017be

Merging this PR will not cause a version bump for any packages. If these changes should not result in a new version, you're good to go. If these changes should result in a version bump, you need to add a changeset.

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@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate-npm-koa-vulnerability branch from 5c961bf to 2df583e Compare October 23, 2025 09:45
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate-npm-koa-vulnerability branch from 2df583e to c7b8bda Compare October 23, 2025 09:47
@renovate renovate bot force-pushed the renovate-npm-koa-vulnerability branch from c7b8bda to cd017be Compare October 23, 2025 09:49
@zbrydon zbrydon merged commit 1ed5afd into main Oct 23, 2025
7 checks passed
@zbrydon zbrydon deleted the renovate-npm-koa-vulnerability branch October 23, 2025 09:53
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2 participants