CVE-2026-30851: Caddy forward_auth copy_headers Does Not Strip Client-Supplied Headers, Allowing Identity Injection and Privilege Escalation

Caddy’s forward_auth directive with copy_headers generates conditional header-set operations that only fire when the upstream auth service includes the named header in its response. No delete or remove operation is generated for the original client-supplied request header with the same name.

When an auth service returns 200 OK without one of the configured copy_headers headers, the client-supplied header passes through unchanged to the backend. Any requester holding a valid authentication token can inject arbitrary values for trusted identity headers, resulting in privilege escalation.

This is a regression introduced by PR #6608 in November 2024. All stable releases from v2.10.0 onward are affected.