Axios: Full Man-in-the-Middle via Prototype Pollution Gadget in `config.proxy`
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 1.0%
exploitation probability
1.0%top 39% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. From 1.0.0 to before 1.16.0, the Axios library is vulnerable to a Prototype Pollution "Gadget" attack that allows any Object.prototype pollution in the application's dependency tree to be escalated into a full Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack — intercepting, reading, and modifying all HTTP traffic including authentication credentials. The HTTP adapter at lib/adapters/http.js:670 reads config.proxy via standard property access, which traverses the prototype chain. Because proxy is not present in Axios defaults, the merged config object has no own proxy property, making it trivially injectable via prototype pollution. Once injected, setProxy() routes all HTTP requests through the attacker's proxy server. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.16.0.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N
Affected products
axios · axiosReferences
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:20889https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:20938https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:27044https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:28964https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:29082https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:29197https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:29800https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:29864https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:30650https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:30651https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:33005https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:33155