GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.8) CWE-346 vulnerability in guzzlehttp/guzzle. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
guzzlehttp/guzzle: Dot-Only Cookie Domains Match All Hosts
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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 GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx.
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
GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx 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 0 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
guzzlehttp/guzzleReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Packagist packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Impact
CookieJar incorrectly accepts cookies with a dot-only Domain attribute, such as Domain=., Domain=.., Domain=..., and whitespace-padded variants such as Domain= . . In affected versions, SetCookie::matchesDomain() removes leading dots from the cookie domain, normalizing dot-only values to the empty string; SetCookie::validate() only rejected a strictly empty domain, so these cookies could be stored and the empty normalized domain was treated as matching any request host.
An attacker-controlled origin that an application requests with a shared cookie jar can therefore set a cookie that Guzzle later sends to unrelated hosts using the same jar. This may allow cookie injection or session fixation against downstream services, depending on how those services interpret the injected cookie. Applications are affected when they use Guzzle's cookie support, for example new Client(['cookies' => true]) or an explicit shared CookieJar, and reuse the same jar across attacker-controlled and trusted origins.
Applications that do not use Guzzle's cookie support, or that use separate cookie jars per origin or trust boundary, are not affected. This issue is distinct from public suffix list validation: dot-only domains contain no domain label and should not match unrelated hosts.
Patches
The issue is patched in 7.12.1 and later. Starting in that release, Guzzle rejects dot-only cookie Domain attributes and prevents an empty normalized cookie domain from matching any request host.
Workarounds
If you cannot upgrade immediately, do not reuse the same CookieJar instance across untrusted and trusted origins. Use separate cookie jars per origin or trust boundary, or disable cookie handling for requests to untrusted hosts.
Avoid using new Client(['cookies' => true]) for clients that may contact unrelated hosts with different trust levels, because that option creates one shared jar for the client.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐘Packagist | guzzlehttp/guzzle | all versions | 7.12.1 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for guzzlehttp/guzzle. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update guzzlehttp/guzzle to 7.12.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx 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 pinpoints whether GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-cwxw-98qj-8qjx across Packagist dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.