CVSS v3.1
7.5
EPSS
0.46%
Published
Mar 7, 2026
Modified
Mar 11, 2026
Public PoC / Exploit (1)
All weaponized →Links to public security research (Exploit-DB, Nuclei, Trickest, GitHub) for defensive use only.
Description
express-rate-limit is a basic rate-limiting middleware for Express. In versions starting from 8.0.0 and prior to versions 8.0.2, 8.1.1, 8.2.2, and 8.3.0, the default keyGenerator in express-rate-limit applies IPv6 subnet masking (/56 by default) to all addresses that net.isIPv6() returns true for. This includes IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses (::ffff:x.x.x.x), which Node.js returns as request.ip on dual-stack servers. Because the first 80 bits of all IPv4-mapped addresses are zero, a /56 (or any /32 to /80) subnet mask produces the same network key (::/56) for every IPv4 client. This collapses all IPv4 traffic into a single rate-limit bucket: one client exhausting the limit causes HTTP 429 for all other IPv4 clients. This issue has been patched in versions 8.0.2, 8.1.1, 8.2.2, and 8.3.0.
CVSS Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HWeaknesses (CWE)
Affected Products (3)
References (2)