Axios patches critical vulnerability that allows attackers to steal cloud credentials

Just two weeks after a massive supply chain compromise, Axios, a widely used JavaScript library for making web requests, is experiencing another critical threat. It contains a bug that allows attackers to chain vulnerabilities and achieve full cloud compromise. However, standard Node.JS environments are safe, security researchers assure.

Developers have been having a hard time lately: update packages to the latest versions, and risk supply chain compromise, or delay updates, and risk exploitation of critical vulnerabilities.

Axios has suffered from both in less than two weeks.

The massively popular library with 100 million weekly downloads is currently affected by a critical vulnerability with a perfect severity rating of 10 out of 10.

Under the right conditions, this vulnerability enables attackers to achieve full cloud compromise.

If, for example, a website uses Axios for making web requests, which is common, attackers would need at least one other vulnerable library somewhere in the code to plant hidden instructions.

A vulnerable version of Axios will escalate the breach by sending the web request alongside the malicious instructions to the AWS credential service, exfiltrating the credentials, and handing attackers the keys.

“A critical flaw (CVE-2026-40175) enables remote code execution and full cloud compromise. Attackers can chain prototype pollution, SSRF, and request smuggling to bypass AWS IMDSv2 and steal credentials. A public PoC is already available, increasing risk,” Hunt.io, a threat intelligence platform, posted on X.

The Axios team released patches with version 1.15.0. All previous versions (v0.x-v1.x) are affected by the bug.

Jason Saayman, lead maintainer of Axios, explains that the exploitation of the bug is not straightforward.

“It would be quite hard for this to be exploited. It requires an exploited package to pollute the prototype. This is also blocked in Nodes HTTP implementation. However, to be cautious, we have patched what we found,” Saayman said.

The developer also acknowledged that classifying CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) isn’t his expertise, and considered lowering the severity score. The Axios advisory lists the score as 9.9 out of 10.

Aikido researchers say that the vulnerability isn’t realistically exploitable in standard Node.js environments.

“The underlying Axios vulnerability is real and patching is the right call, but the ‘full cloud compromise’ framing overstates the risk in standard environments. The attack chain depends on CRLF header injection, which Node.js has blocked at the runtime level for years. We confirmed this directly with the researcher who reported the issue: in typical Node.js, Bun, or Deno applications, this chain simply doesn't reach. Developers should upgrade, but this isn't a drop-everything emergency,” said Mackenzie Jackson, a Developer Advocate at Aikido Security.

According to the Axios's security advisory, the attack chain is dubbed “Gadget” because the Axios library can be abused as “a gadget when pollution occurs elsewhere.”

“This vulnerability is unique because it requires zero direct user input. If an attacker can pollute Object.prototype via any other library in the stack (e.g., qs, minimist, ini, body-parser), Axios will automatically pick up the polluted properties during its config merge,” the advisory warns, adding a proof of concept.

The exploit demonstrates bypass of AWS’s IMDSv2 (Metadata Service) security layer. A smuggling request to the AWS Metadata Service returns attackers a session token, allowing them to steal Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials and compromise the cloud account.

The bug could also be exploited to inject other headers (Cookie, Authorization, Host) to pivot to internal administrative panels, or poison shared caches to deliver malicious content to users.

Axios credited security researcher Raulvdv for the disclosure of the bug.

This is the second critical security incident affecting Axios in two weeks. Axios is still recovering from a massive supply chain compromise from two weeks ago. North Korean attackers gained access to the Saayman’s account and published malicious versions of Axios containing malware.

The incident sent shockwaves through an open source community, and only a timely community reaction prevented a larger escalation.

Updated on April 15th [10:00 a.m. GMT] with a comment from Aikido Security.

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