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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

Is NextJS considered safe? Would you build something for the government or a big Corp with it?

No. I wasn't concerned about security but just churn. They keep changing things. They also don't fix stuff people care about alot.

I'd just use Koa and keep it simple.

Yes, as much hate as it tends to get on here it's really fine. This vulnerability is unfortunate but every library/framework will have security issues over its lifespan.

The trivial nature of the initial exploit does not instil confidence, nor does it that no one noticed it during the refactor that lead to the second variation of the exploit.

I've seen Northrop Grumman job listings with Next.js experience listed.

The question is not NextJs. It's the kind of developers who are attracted to NextJs in the first place.

I think you have to ask what it’s compared to. Certainly this is no worse than things we’ve seen in the PHP or Java space and people still use those.

However, there is one argument you could make regarding the massive amount of complexity which Next takes on trying to blur client and server execution. That’s prone to creating confusion around validation and control flow, which is a notorious source of security vulnerabilities and it looks like this might be another one as it appears to be related to how they try to transition from edge execution to server-side.

So less a Next-specific point than recognizing that poor architecture is an ongoing risk. This kind approach has been tried and generally failed to deliver in it’s promised repeatedly over the decades because it only saves time building out a quick demo. Once you have a real app, with multiple people working on it, you really want a clear definition of what runs where because it’s much easier to reasonable about security, performance, and reliability if you don’t have layers of abstraction trying to pretend unlike things are alike.

> no worse than things we’ve seen in Java space

My memory fails me - I can’t recall a vulnerability in the JVM ecosystem that allows an attacker to circumvent auth entirely with such trivial ease. Can you name an example?

This doesn’t necessarily allow attackers to circumvent authentication entirely - it’s a framework so it depends on how you configure your app - but there have been plenty of vulnerabilities over the years which break auth or even allow an RCE for the conceptually similar challenge of trying to support complex proxying setups or, more broadly, failing to have clean boundaries for untrusted data.

I’m not defending this one - it’s bad, and an indicator about technical debt levels - but simply trying to encourage some humility about this. It’s not the language, it’s the complexity and attempts to paper over rather than reduce it.

If you want the most recent similar one I’ve seen, Apache Camel had one last week where you could inject their internal magic headers by using different case than the developers expected.

Going a bit older, in some ways this Tomcat exploit from 2020 feels similar because it’s an unenforced internal trust boundary. The AJP connector was more trusted, but also enabled hy default on all ports.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/...

What about Log4J? Just to answer your question, we’re talking about two completely different ecosystems!

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