Oauth2-proxy Oauth2-proxy vulnerabilities

OAuth2 Proxy is a reverse proxy that provides authentication using OAuth2 providers. Versions 7.5.0 through 7.15.1 have a configuration-dependent authentication bypass. Deployments are affected when all of the following are true: Use of `skip_auth_routes` or the legacy `skip_auth_regex`; use of patterns that can be widened by attacker-controlled suffixes, such as `^/foo/.*/bar$` causing potential exposure of `/foo/secret`; and protected upstream applications that interpret `#` as a fragment delimiter or otherwise route the request to the protected base path. In deployments that rely on these settings, an unauthenticated attacker can send a crafted request containing a number sign in the path, including the browser-safe encoded form `%23`, so that OAuth2 Proxy matches a public allowlist rule while the backend serves a protected resource. Deployments that do not use these skip-auth options, or that only allow exact public paths with tightly scoped method and path rules, are not affected. A fix has been implemented in version 7.15.2 to normalize request paths more conservatively before skip-auth matching so fragment content does not influence allowlist decisions. Users who cannot upgrade immediately can reduce exposure by tightening or removing `skip_auth_routes` and `skip_auth_regex` rules, especially patterns that use broad wildcards across path segments. Recommended mitigations include replacing broad rules with exact, anchored public paths and explicit HTTP methods; rejecting requests whose path contains `%23` or `#` at the ingress, load balancer, or WAF level; and/or avoiding placing sensitive application paths behind broad `skip_auth_routes` rules.

OAuth2-Proxy is an open-source tool that can act as either a standalone reverse proxy or a middleware component integrated into existing reverse proxy or load balancer setups. In versions prior to 7.13.0, all deployments of OAuth2 Proxy in front of applications that normalize underscores to dashes in HTTP headers (e.g., WSGI-based frameworks such as Django, Flask, FastAPI, and PHP applications). Authenticated users can inject underscore variants of X-Forwarded-* headers that bypass the proxy’s filtering logic, potentially escalating privileges in the upstream app. OAuth2 Proxy authentication/authorization itself is not compromised. The problem has been patched with v7.13.0. By default all specified headers will now be normalized, meaning that both capitalization and the use of underscores (_) versus dashes (-) will be ignored when matching headers to be stripped. For example, both `X-Forwarded-For` and `X_Forwarded-for` will now be treated as equivalent and stripped away. For those who have a rational that requires keeping a similar looking header and not stripping it, the maintainers introduced a new configuration field for Headers managed through the AlphaConfig called `InsecureSkipHeaderNormalization`. As a workaround, ensure filtering and processing logic in upstream services don't treat underscores and hyphens in Headers the same way.