CVE-2026-16221: fast-uri vulnerable to host confusion via literal backslash authority delimiter

fast-uri v4.1.0 and earlier do not treat a literal backslash (U+005C) as an authority delimiter. Node’s native WHATWG URL (used by fetch(), undici, and Node’s http/https clients) normalizes \ to / for special schemes (http, https, ws, wss, ftp, file), so the two parsers extract different hosts from the same input string.

For example, http://evil.com\@allowed.com is treated by fast-uri as host allowed.com with userinfo evil.com\, while Node’s WHATWG URL parser and fetch() see host evil.com with path /@allowed.com.

Applications that use fast-uri to enforce host-based policy (allowlists, denylists, loopback/SSRF filtering, redirect validation, outbound proxy routing) before passing the same URL into Node’s URL or fetch() consumers see a policy/use desync and can be steered to an unintended destination, including cloud metadata endpoints, loopback, or internal hosts.