Nginx is a widely used web server that has dominated the market since its creation in 2004. This article explores the intricacies of Nginx, with a focus on the location and alias directives that determine how it handles specific URLs. It also discusses potential vulnerabilities and demonstrates how they can lead to security exploits, using research presented at the BlackHat 2018 conference. The article provides case studies involving Bitwarden and Google’s HPC Toolkit to illustrate the risk of data exposure if vulnerabilities are not addressed. Additionally, it introduces an automated tool called NavGix for detecting these vulnerabilities.
https://labs.hakaioffsec.com/nginx-alias-traversal/