Browser-Use Agents and Server-Side Request Forgery: Old Vulns, New Vectors
Browser-Use Agents and Server-Side Request Forgery: Old Vulns, New Vectors SSRF is not new. It’s been on the OWASP Top 10 since 2021, it’s been in every pentester’s playbook for a decade, and it’s the reason you’re not supposed to let user input control outbound HTTP requests from your server. We know how to prevent it. We know how to test for it. We’ve written the cheat sheets, the detection rules, the WAF signatures. And then we gave AI agents a browser and told them to “go look things up.” SSRF is back, and this time it’s wearing a trench coat made of natural language. The Old SSRF: A Quick Refresher Classic SSRF is straightforward: an application takes a URL from user input and makes a server-side request to it. The attacker supplies http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ instead of a legitimate URL. The server dutifully fetches AWS credentials from the instance metadata service and hands them to the attacker. Game o...