urllib3: Sensitive headers forwarded across origins in proxied low-level redirects

Impact

When following cross-origin redirects for requests made using urllib3’s high-level APIs, such as urllib3.request(), PoolManager.request(), and ProxyManager.request(), sensitive headers — Authorization, Cookie, and Proxy-Authorization (defined in Retry.DEFAULT_REMOVE_HEADERS_ON_REDIRECT) — are stripped by default, as expected.

However, cross-origin redirects followed from the low-level API via ProxyManager.connection_from_url().urlopen(..., assert_same_host=False) still forward these sensitive headers.

Affected usage

Applications and libraries using urllib3 versions earlier than 2.7.0 may be affected if they allow cross-origin redirects while making requests through HTTPConnection.urlopen() instances created via ProxyManager.connection_from_url().

Remediation

Upgrade to urllib3 version 2.7.0 or later, in which sensitive headers are stripped from redirects followed by HTTPConnection.

If upgrading is not immediately possible, avoid using this low-level redirect flow for cross-origin redirects. If appropriate for your use case, switch to ProxyManager.request().