CVE-2026-35409 — directus
HIGHCVE-2026-35409 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.7) Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in directus. A fix is available for directus — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Directus has a SSRF Protection Bypass via IPv4-Mapped IPv6 Addresses in File Import
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-35409.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-35409 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,636 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
directusnpmDescription
Summary
A Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) protection bypass has been identified and fixed in Directus. The IP address validation mechanism used to block requests to local and private networks could be circumvented using IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address notation.
Details
Directus implements an IP deny-list to prevent server-side requests to internal/private network ranges. The validation logic failed to normalize IPv4-Mapped IPv6 addresses (e.g., the IPv6 representation of 127.0.0.1) before checking them against the deny-list. Because the deny-list check did not recognize these mapped addresses as equivalent to their IPv4 counterparts, an attacker could bypass the restriction while the underlying HTTP client and operating system still resolved and connected to the intended private target.
This has been fixed by adding a normalization step that converts IPv4-Mapped IPv6 addresses to their canonical IPv4 form prior to validation.
Impact
An authenticated user (or an unauthenticated user if public file-import permissions are enabled) could exploit this bypass to perform SSRF attacks against internal services on the same host (databases, caches, internal APIs) or cloud instance metadata endpoints (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure IMDS).
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | directus | all versions | 11.16.0npm install directus@11.16.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for directus, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update directus to 11.16.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-35409 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2026-35409 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2026-35409. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-35409 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2026-35409 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.