Improper Validation of Syntactic Correctness of Input

Summary

Express.js minimalist web framework for node. Express.js versions prior to 4.19.2, and 5.0.x prior to 5.0.0-beta.3 are affected by an open redirect vulnerability using malformed URLs. When a user of Express performs a redirect using a user-provided URL Express performs an encode using "encodeurl" on the contents before passing it to the "location" header. This can cause malformed URLs to be evaluated in unexpected ways by common redirect allow list implementations in Express applications, leading to an Open Redirect via bypass of a properly implemented allow list. The main method impacted is "res.location()" but this is also called from within "res.redirect()".