i18next-http-middleware: HTTP response splitting and DoS via unsanitised Content-Language header

Summary

Versions of i18next-http-middleware prior to 3.9.3 wrote user-controlled language values into the Content-Language response header after passing them through utils.escape(), which is an HTML-entity encoder that does not strip carriage return, line feed, or other control characters. When the application used an older i18next (< 19.5.0) that still exercised the backward-compatibility fallback at LanguageDetector.js:100 or otherwise produced a raw detected value, CRLF sequences in the attacker-controlled lng parameter reached res.setHeader('Content-Language', ...) verbatim.

Impact

Two concrete outcomes depending on the Node.js version:

• Node.js < 14.6.0 — HTTP response splitting. An attacker crafting a request like GET /?lng=en%0d%0aX-Injected%3A+malicious could inject arbitrary additional HTTP response headers, enabling:
• Session fixation via an injected Set-Cookie
• Cache poisoning (injecting Location, Content-Type, etc.)
• Reflected XSS in controlled response bodies
• Node.js ≥ 14.6.0 — denial of service. res.setHeader() throws ERR_INVALID_CHAR when the value contains CRLF. Because the middleware did not catch this error, it propagated as an unhandled exception, returning a 500 response to all concurrent users sharing that process (in worker-pool deployments this can knock out a full server instance).

The same header-setting code path fires inside the languageChanged event listener and again in the main middleware flow, so the flaw was triggered at least twice per affected request.

Related (same release)

Version 3.9.3 also tightens the hasXSS() regex that was designed as a secondary filter on detected language values. The previous pattern /<\s*\w+\s*on\w+\s*=.*?>/i only matched event handlers in the first attribute position, so payloads like <input autofocus onfocus=alert(1)> bypassed the filter. Applications that rendered res.locals.language into HTML with a context-unsafe templating mode (EJS <%- %>, Pug !{…}, Handlebars {{{…}}}) could be XSSed despite the filter being in place. This bypass is noted here because it is fixed in the same release, but the primary vulnerability reported in this advisory is the CRLF/header-injection path above.

Affected versions

< 3.9.3.

Patch

Fixed in 3.9.3. The patch introduces utils.sanitizeHeaderValue(str) which strips \r, \n, and other C0/C1 control characters, and replaces both utils.escape(lng) call sites in lib/index.js with it. The hasXSS() regex has also been tightened to match event-handler attributes at any position.

Workarounds

No workaround short of upgrading. Front-proxying the middleware with a WAF rule that rejects \r/\n in query parameters, cookies, and path segments is a partial mitigation.

Credits

Discovered via an internal security audit of the i18next ecosystem.