GHSA-6chq-wfr3-2hj9 — Axios: Header Injection via Prototype Pollution

Affected: npm: axios

### Summary

A prototype pollution gadget exists in the Axios HTTP adapter (lib/adapters/http.js) that allows an attacker to inject arbitrary HTTP headers into outgoing requests. The vulnerability exploits duck-type checking of the data payload, where if Object.prototype is polluted with getHeaders, append, pipe, on, once, and Symbol.toStringTag, Axios misidentifies any plain object payload as a FormData instance and calls the attacker-controlled getHeaders() function, merging the returned headers into the outgoing request.

The vulnerable code resides exclusively in lib/adapters/http.js. The prototype pollution source does not need to originate from Axios itself — any prototype pollution primitive in any dependency in the application's dependency tree is sufficient to trigger this gadget.

Prerequisites:

A prototype pollution primitive must exist somewhere in the application's dependency chain (e.g., via lodash.merge, qs, JSON5, or any deep-merge utility processing attacker-controlled input). The pollution source is not required to be in Axios. The application must use Axios to make HTTP requests with a data payload (POST, PUT, PATCH).

### Details

The vulnerability is in `lib/adapters/http.js`, in the data serialization pipeline:

```javascript // lib/adapters/http.js } else if (utils.isFormData(data) && utils.isFunction(data.getHeaders)) { headers.set(data.getHeaders()); // ... } ```

Axios uses two sequential duck-type checks, both of which can be satisfied vi…

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GHSA-6chq-wfr3-2hj9 — Axios: Header Injection via Prototype Pollution