Heimdall: IP Spoofing via Unvalidated Forwarding Headers

Heimdall is a cloud native Identity Aware Proxy and Access Control Decision service. Prior to version 0.17.17, when the trusted_proxies option is configured, heimdall extracts client IP addresses from the Forwarded (for= parameter) and X-Forwarded-For headers and exposes them as Request.ClientIPAddresses to the rule pipeline. However, extracted values are not validated to be syntactically valid IP addresses. Arbitrary strings, malformed IP literals, and RFC 7239 unknown values and obfuscated identifiers are accepted without further checks. In addition, the Forwarded header parser splits on , and ; without accounting for RFC 7239 quoted strings, which can cause a single quoted value to be parsed as multiple entries, with fragments — including trailing quote characters — treated as independent addresses. This issue has been patched in version 0.17.17.

Source published

23 Oct 2026 12:28:09 UTC

Source modified

23 Oct 2026 12:28:09 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 16:01:20 UTC

Source terms

CVE Program Terms of Use

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CVSS 4.0 · 7.0 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:N