CVE-2026-16221
NVD analysis in progress
Impact: fast-uri versions from 2.3.1 through 4.1.0 (including the 3.x line up to 3.1.3 and the 2.x line up to 2.4.2) do not treat a literal backslash character (U+005C) as an authority delimiter. Node's native WHATWG URL parser, used by fetch, undici, and Node's http and https clients, normalizes the backslash to a forward slash for special schemes such as http, https, ws, wss, ftp, and file. As a result, the two parsers extract different hosts from the same input string. Applications that use fast-uri to enforce host-based policy such as allowlists, denylists, loopback or SSRF filtering, redirect validation, or outbound proxy routing before passing the same URL into Node's URL or fetch consumers can be steered to an unintended destination, including cloud metadata endpoints, loopback, or internal hosts. Patches: upgrade to fast-uri 4.1.1, 3.1.4, or 2.4.3. Workarounds: none.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can modify or destroy data.
- Weakness
- Two components read the same data differently, so a check on one side does not protect the other.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.