Description

There is a discovered high-severity vulnerability in the Axios HTTP client library, specifically CVE-2025-58754, which impacts all versions prior to Axios 1.11.0. The vulnerability permits attackers to crash Node.js applications by taking advantage of the way Axios processes data: URLs. When Axios processes an incoming data: scheme URL, it skips normal HTTP protections and directly Base64-decodes the payload into memory. This can result in huge memory allocations, which flood the system and crash the application. The vulnerability has a CVSS 3.1 rating of 7.5, underscoring its system availability impact. The root problem is Axios's inability to enforce configured thresholds such as maxContentLength and maxBodyLength during handling of data URLs. Despite having adequate streaming and memory protection, attackers can construct data URLs that bypass those defenses completely. The attack is not required to be authenticated or interactive, so it is very simple to use. Even minimal payloads in base64 encoding can take up hundreds of megabytes of memory in vulnerable contexts, especially hitting resource-limited systems or applications with low heap size constraints. In order to reduce the risk, organizations that deploy Axios should upgrade to version 1.12.0 or higher, where the vulnerability has been fixed by requiring size validations on data URLs. Those who cannot upgrade immediately should utilize application-level validation in order to block or sanitize data URLs coming in. But upgrading is still the best and total solution in order to avoid denial-of-service situations brought about by this flaw.