Lemmy, a link aggregator and forum for the fediverse, is vulnerable to server-side request forgery via a dependency on activitypub_federation, a framework for ActivityPub federation in Rust. Prior to version 0.19.16, the GET /api/v4/image/{filename} endpoint is vulnerable to unauthenticated SSRF through parameter injection in the file_type query parameter. An attacker can inject arbitrary query parameters into the internal request to pict-rs, including the proxy parameter which causes pict-rs to fetch arbitrary URLs. This issue has been patched in version 0.19.16.
The web server receives a URL or similar request from an upstream component and retrieves the contents of this URL, but it does not sufficiently ensure that the request is being sent to the expected destination.