CVE-2025-21620 — deno_fetch

Summary

When you send a request with the Authorization header to one domain, and the response asks to redirect to a different domain, Deno'sfetch() redirect handling creates a follow-up redirect request that keeps the original Authorization header, leaking its content to that second domain.

Details

The right behavior would be to drop the Authorization header instead, in this scenario. The same is generally applied to Cookie and Proxy-Authorization headers, and is done for not only host changes, but also protocol/port changes. Generally referred to as "origin".

The documentation states:

Deno does not follow the same-origin policy, because the Deno user agent currently does not have the concept of origins, and it does not have a cookie jar. This means Deno does not need to protect against leaking authenticated data cross origin

Reproduction

const ac = new AbortController()

const server1 = Deno.serve({ port: 3001, signal: ac.signal }, (req) => {
  return new Response(null, {
    status: 302,
    headers: {
      'location': 'http://localhost:3002/redirected'
    },
  })
})

const server2 = Deno.serve({ port: 3002, signal: ac.signal }, (req) => {
  const body = JSON.stringify({
    url: req.url,
    hasAuth: req.headers.has('authorization'),
  })
  return new Response(body, {
    status: 200,
    headers: {'content-type': 'application/json'},
  })
})

async function main() {
  const response = await fetch("http://localhost:3001/", {
    headers: {authorization: 'Bearer foo'}
  })
  const body = await response.json()
  
  ac.abort()
  
  if (body.hasAuth) {
    console.error('ERROR: Authorization header should not be present after cross-origin redirect')
  } else {
    console.log('SUCCESS: Authorization header is not present after cross-origin redirect')
  }
}

setTimeout(main, 500)