React Router, a popular declarative routing library for React applications, has released version 7.1.4, a patch update following the 7.1.3 release. Both versions share the same core dependencies: cookie, turbo-stream, @types/cookie, and set-cookie-parser. Similarly, the development dependencies, including tsup, react, rimraf, wireit, react-dom, typescript, and @types/set-cookie-parser, remain consistent between the two versions, ensuring a familiar development environment. The peer dependencies, requiring React and React DOM versions 18 or greater also didn't change.
The key differences between versions 7.1.4 and 7.1.3 lie primarily in their release date and potentially minor bug fixes or performance improvements. Version 7.1.4 was released on January 30, 2025, while version 7.1.3 was released on January 17, 2025, nearly two weeks prior. Also the unpackedSize differs slightly: 2280964 bytes on version 7.1.4 versus 2277376 on version 7.1.3. This small increase in unpackedSize in 7.1.4 might indicate additional code or assets.
For developers considering an upgrade, version 7.1.4 likely introduces subtle enhancements or resolves recent issues found in 7.1.3. It’s recommended to review the changelog or release notes for a detailed breakdown of specific changes. Upgrading to the latest patch version is generally advisable to benefit from the most recent bug fixes and potential performance gains, thus ensureing a stable and optimized routing experience within your React applications. As with any update, thorough testing in a development environment before deploying to production is best practice.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 7.1.4 of the package
React Router allows pre-render data spoofing on React-Router framework mode
After some research, it turns out that it's possible to modify pre-rendered data by adding a header to the request. This allows to completely spoof its contents and modify all the values of the data object passed to the HTML. Latest versions are impacted.
The vulnerable header is X-React-Router-Prerender-Data, a specific JSON object must be passed to it in order for the spoofing to be successful as we will see shortly. Here is the vulnerable code :
To use the header, React-router must be used in Framework mode, and for the attack to be possible the target page must use a loader.
Versions used for our PoC:
routes/ssr).data. In our case the page is called /ssr:We access it by adding the suffix .data and retrieve the data object, needed for the header:
X-React-Router-Prerender-Data header with the previously retrieved object as its value. You can change any value of your data object (do not touch the other values, the latter being necessary for the object to be processed correctly and not throw an error):As you can see, all values have been changed/overwritten by the values provided via the header.
The impact is significant, if a cache system is in place, it is possible to poison a response in which all of the data transmitted via a loader would be altered by an attacker allowing him to take control of the content of the page and modify it as he wishes via a cache-poisoning attack. This can lead to several types of attacks including potential stored XSS depending on the context in which the data is injected and/or how the data is used on the client-side.