Critical Proxy Module Flaw: No Request Validation Exposes Campus-Marketplace, CCPS-Portal to Malicious Payloads

A critical architectural flaw in the proxy module of a major campus services platform has been identified, creating a direct, unprotected pipeline for malicious payloads to reach downstream systems. The module, located in `src/proxy/`, acts as the central gateway between the user-facing Hub and critical backend services like Campus-Marketplace and CCPS-Portal. However, it performs zero input validation, sanitization, or rate limiting on the requests it forwards. This transforms the proxy from a protective layer into a silent conduit, allowing any vulnerability in a downstream service to be directly exploited without any filtering or throttling at the gateway level.

The proxy's lack of basic security controls opens up multiple attack vectors. An attacker can use it to forward excessively large payloads, potentially causing memory exhaustion and denial-of-service on backend services. More critically, because the proxy uses its own single identity to communicate with all downstream services, it completely bypasses any per-user rate limits those services may have in place. This allows a single malicious user to flood multiple systems simultaneously. The design also enables attack amplification, where one crafted request to the proxy could be fanned out to several backend services at once, multiplying the impact.

This vulnerability places the entire ecosystem of integrated campus services at heightened risk. The absence of request body size limits, content-type validation, and user-based rate limiting at the proxy layer means that the security of the entire platform is only as strong as the weakest downstream service. The suggested fix involves implementing fundamental gateway controls: enforcing `bodyLimit` in Fastify, adding validation middleware, and instituting per-user rate limiting based on extracted user identity. Until these measures are in place, the proxy module remains a systemic weak point.