Animica 6.1.0 fixes a serious authorization hole in the node’s JSON-RPC server, found and closed on 2026-07-09.
Behind nginx, every /rpc request reached the node over loopback. The node’s _is_local_ip() check therefore authorized the wallet.* namespace for the whole internet. Two live, unauthenticated oracles resulted:
wallet.send/wallet.createAddress— remote spend and address minting from the node’s own key store.backupwallet(the Bitcoin-compatible RPC) — ashutil.copy2of the plaintext node key store, containing the secret key of every wallet the node held, to an arbitrary path. Chained withsnapshot.downloadChunk, this allowed exfiltration of all node keys.
The fix adds a public-edge detector, _is_public_edge_request, which treats any request carrying X-Real-IP, X-Forwarded-For or X-Animica-Public-Edge as remote, so the localhost bypass no longer applies behind a reverse proxy. backupwallet now calls _authorize_wallet_rpc(ctx) exactly as wallet.send does. Direct-localhost callers, private-network callers and admin-token callers are unaffected.
Operators running a node behind any proxy should upgrade immediately. The same class of problem — trusting a forwarding header as evidence of locality — was closed from the other direction in 7.0.0, which stopped a spoofed X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1 from gaining local status: the is-local and admin-allowlist checks now use only the real transport peer and treat any forwarding header as remote.
Together with the 6.0.0 release’s at-rest wallet encryption (animica wallet encrypt, ANIMICA_WALLET_PASSPHRASE), this removes the two ways a node’s key store could leave the machine through RPC. Self-hosted node operators need the new package; pip install -U animica and restart.