axios Uncontrolled Resource Consumption Vulnerability (CVE-2026-44496)

Description

Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Axios versions before 0.32.0 on the 0.x line and before 1.16.0 on the 1.x line build a regular expression from the configured XSRF cookie name without escaping regex metacharacters. In standard browser environments, an attacker who can influence the cookie name passed to axios can cause expensive regex backtracking while axios reads document.cookie. The practical impact is client-side availability degradation, such as freezing the affected browser tab while axios prepares a request. The issue does not affect ordinary Node.js HTTP adapter usage, React Native, or web workers, where axios does not read document.cookie. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.32.0 and 1.16.0.