Executive brief
NASA Earthdata Search is a public-facing web application that allows users to discover and access Earth observation data. A vulnerability in the image scaling endpoint allows unauthenticated attackers to perform server-side request forgery (SSRF), potentially enabling them to access internal systems, discover hidden hosts on the internal network, or interact with internal services on behalf of the vulnerable server.
Technical details
The scaleImage function in serverless/src/scaleImage/handler.js of the scale endpoint is vulnerable to server-side request forgery (SSRF). The vulnerability allows unauthenticated remote attackers to manipulate image scaling requests to make the server fetch arbitrary URLs, including internal resources. No authentication is required to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker can leverage this to discover internal network hosts, access internal services, or exfiltrate data from systems accessible only to the vulnerable application. The exploit is currently public and the vendor has not responded to early disclosure attempts.
Affected products
- NASA Earthdata Search 1.0.0
Timeline
- 2026-08-31: disclosed
- exploited: exploit is now public