There is a potential vulnerability in Traefik managing the requests using a PathPrefix, Path or PathRegex matcher.
When Traefik is configured to route the requests to a backend using a matcher based on the path; if the request path contains an encoded restricted character from the following set ('/', '', 'Null', ';', '?', '#'), it’s possible to target a backend, exposed using another router, by-passing the middlewares chain.
apiVersion: traefik.io/v1alpha1
kind: IngressRoute
metadata:
name: my-service
spec:
routes:
- match: PathPrefix(‘/admin/’)
kind: Rule
services:
- name: service-a
port: 8080
middlewares:
- name: my-security-middleware
- match: PathPrefix(‘/’)
kind: Rule
services:
- name: service-a
port: 8080
In such a case, the request http://mydomain.example.com/admin%2F will reach the backend service-a without operating the middleware my-security-middleware and passing the security put in place for the /admin/ path.
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please open an issue.
Traefik evaluates router rules before decoding or normalizing the request path, but forwards the request after decoding to the backend service. As a result, routes meant to block access to sensitive endpoints (such as internal, beta, or admin endpoints) can be trivially bypassed.
Traefik configuration used in this issue :
entryPoints = ["web"]
rule = "PathPrefix(`/report_note`)"
priority = 10
middlewares = ["block-access"]
service = "flask-service"
[http.middlewares.block-access.replacePathRegex]
regex = ".*"
replacement = "/blocked"
The intention is to block all access to /report_note.
However, the following request bypasses the block:
POST /%2freport_note HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:62814
Access Control Bypass: Any endpoint intended to be blocked (e.g., admin/debug/beta APIs) can be accessed by URL-encoding slashes or other characters.
This could lead to:
{
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-436"
],
"github_reviewed": true,
"github_reviewed_at": "2025-12-08T16:42:30Z",
"nvd_published_at": "2025-12-09T01:16:55Z",
"severity": "MODERATE"
}