Malcolm's nginx Lua role-based access control (RBAC) layer decides whether an authenticated user may reach a role-restricted path (e.g. /htadmin, /auth, /admin_login, /arkime/api/esadmin, NetBox, upload endpoints) by pattern-matching the raw, percent-encoded request URI. Nginx itself, however, selects which location block actually serves the request using the percent-decoded, normalized URI. Because the RBAC check never percent-decodes its input, an authenticated low-privilege user can request an admin-only path using percent-encoding (e.g. /%68tadmin.php) and have nginx route it to the restricted location while the Lua RBAC gate evaluating the un-decoded raw string finds no matching restriction and grants access.
Malcolm's nginx Lua role-based access control (RBAC) layer decides whether an authenticated user may reach a role-restricted path (e.g. /htadmin, /auth, /admin_login, /arkime/api/esadmin, NetBox, upload endpoints) by pattern-matching the raw, percent-encoded request URI. Nginx itself, however, selects which location block actually serves the request using the percent-decoded, normalized URI. Because the RBAC check never percent-decodes its input, an authenticated low-privilege user can request an admin-only path using percent-encoding (e.g. /%68tadmin.php) and have nginx route it to the restricted location while the Lua RBAC gate evaluating the un-decoded raw string finds no matching restriction and grants access.
Malcolm's front nginx reverse proxy defines a "Dashboards ā Arkime shortcut" location using a case-insensitive regex matcher but a case-sensitive rewrite. A request whose path segment is not exact-lowercase (for example /IDDASH2ARK/...) enters the location (the matcher fires) but evades the rewrite (no redirect is issued), so nginx falls through to the location's proxy_pass to the Arkime backend. That location is the one proxied location in the shipped config that does not include the per-location authentication file, so the request reaches Arkime unauthenticated. The same location also forwards a client-supplied X-Forwarded-User header un-overwritten, and Arkime is configured to trust X-Forwarded-User as the authenticated username ā so an unauthenticated network caller can reach the Arkime backend while supplying a forged, auto-provisioned identity. Malcolm's nginx based reverse proxy contains a URL path normalization inconsistency between its Lua based role-based access control (RBAC) authorization layer and nginx's own request routing logic. An authenticated user can craft a specially formatted request path to bypass role-based restrictions and reach administrative or role gated endpoints they should not have access to. This affects all restricted paths protected by the RBAC authorization layer, including file upload, PHP server, htadmin, and authentication management interfaces. Malcolm file-upload component ships the upstream FilePond PHP server (pqina/filepond-server-pā¦