Axios up to 0.31.0/1.15.0 improper authentication

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability identified as critical has been detected in Axios up to 0.31.0/1.15.0. Affected is an unknown function. The manipulation leads to improper authentication. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2026-42041. The attack can be initiated remotely. There is not any exploit available. You should upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Axios up to 0.31.0/1.15.0 and classified as critical. This issue affects some unknown functionality. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a improper authentication vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-287. When an actor claims to have a given identity, the product does not prove or insufficiently proves that the claim is correct. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Prior to 1.15.1 and 0.31.1, the Axios library is vulnerable to a Prototype Pollution "Gadget" attack that allows any Object.prototype pollution to silently suppress all HTTP error responses (401, 403, 500, etc.), causing them to be treated as successful responses. This completely bypasses application-level authentication and error handling. The root cause is that validateStatus is the only config property using the mergeDirectKeys merge strategy, which uses JavaScript's in operator — an operator that inherently traverses the prototype chain. When Object.prototype.validateStatus is polluted with () => true, all HTTP status codes are accepted as success. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.15.1 and 0.31.1.

The advisory is shared at github.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-42041 since 04/23/2026. The exploitation is known to be difficult. The attack may be initiated remotely. No form of authentication is needed for a successful exploitation. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 310528 (Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2026-42041), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading to version 0.31.1 or 1.15.1 eliminates this vulnerability.

The vulnerability is also documented in the databases at Tenable (310528), EUVD (EUVD-2026-25606) and CERT Bund (WID-SEC-2026-1513). If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

Affected

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat OpenShift

Productinfo

Name

• Axios

Version

• 0.1
• 0.2
• 0.3
• 0.4
• 0.5
• 0.6
• 0.7
• 0.8
• 0.9
• 0.10
• 0.11
• 0.12
• 0.13
• 0.14
• 0.15
• 0.16
• 0.17
• 0.18
• 0.19
• 0.20
• 0.21
• 0.22
• 0.23
• 0.24
• 0.25
• 0.26
• 0.27
• 0.28
• 0.29
• 0.30
• 0.31.0
• 1.0
• 1.1
• 1.2
• 1.3
• 1.4
• 1.5
• 1.6
• 1.7
• 1.8
• 1.9
• 1.10
• 1.11
• 1.12
• 1.13
• 1.14
• 1.15.0

Website

• Product: https://github.com/axios/axios/

CPE 2.3info

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If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

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