Executive brief
Axios, a widely used tool for making web requests in applications, failed to enforce size limits on data being sent or received when using its 'fetch' adapter. This means that even if a developer set a maximum size for security, an attacker could send a massive amount of data or force the application to download a huge file. This can lead to the application crashing or becoming unavailable due to memory and processing exhaustion.
Technical details
A resource exhaustion vulnerability exists in Axios (versions 1.7.0 to 1.15.x) due to the 'fetch' adapter failing to implement size limit checks. Specifically, lib/adapters/fetch.js does not destructure or utilize maxContentLength or maxBodyLength from the request configuration. This allows the adapter to dispatch requests and materialize responses (via text, arrayBuffer, or blob) that exceed configured boundaries. Attackers can exploit this by providing large 'data:' URLs or by returning oversized responses from a malicious server, leading to memory or CPU exhaustion in server-side runtimes. The issue is resolved in versions 0.32.0 and 1.16.0 by adding upfront size checks and streaming enforcement.
Affected products
- Axios Axios >= 1.7.0, < 1.16.0; >= 0.32.0 (for 0.x branch)
Timeline
- 2026-05-30: advisory: GitHub advisory published by maintainers
- 2026-06-11: disclosed: CVE-2026-44488 published to NVD