How to solve error "A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (:)."

Question

I am trying to fetch binaries/files from Artifacts --> Package using API call. URL: GET https://feeds.dev.azure.com/TTLDevOps/CI-CD_Sandbox/_apis/packaging/Feeds/Universal_Artifacts3/packages/MavenProject.Automationtesting:Automationtesting/versions/latest/files?api-version=7.2-preview.1 Where Package name is "MavenProject.Automationtesting:Automationtesting"

But in response I am getting error as below:

{
    "$id": "1",
    "innerException": null,
    "message": "A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (:).",
    "typeName": "System.Web.HttpException, System.Web",
    "typeKey": "HttpException",
    "errorCode": 0,
    "eventId": 0
}

This seems to be because of : in the URL (Name of Package). One solution to replace : with %3A didn't work in my case. Can anyone suggest a solution for this case.

Answer 1

Hi @Errammagari, Sai, Asp.Net 4.0+ comes with a very strict built-in request validation, part of it is the potential dangerous characters in the url which may be used in XSS attacks. Here are default invalid characters in the url : < > * % & : \ ? You'd better avoid using characters like "?" . You can try these settings in your web.config file:

<system.web>
    <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="" requestValidationMode="2.0" />
    <pages validateRequest="false" />
</system.web>

or you can change this behavior in your config file:

<system.web>
    <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?" />
</system.web>

Best regards,
Lan Huang

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