A use after free vulnerability exists in curl <v8.1.0 in the way libcurl offers a feature to verify an SSH server's public key using a SHA 256 hash. When this check fails, libcurl would free the memory for the fingerprint before it returns an error message containing the (now freed) hash. This flaw risks inserting sensitive heap-based data into the error message that might be shown to users or otherwise get leaked and revealed.
A vulnerability in input validation exists in curl <8.0 during communication using the TELNET protocol may allow an attacker to pass on maliciously crafted user name and "telnet options" during server negotiation. The lack of proper input scrubbing allows an attacker to send content or perform option negotiation without the application's intent. This vulnerability could be exploited if an application allows user input, thereby enabling attackers to execute arbitrary code on the system.
A path traversal vulnerability exists in curl <8.0.0 SFTP implementation causes the tilde (~) character to be wrongly replaced when used as a prefix in the first path element, in addition to its intended use as the first element to indicate a path relative to the user's home directory. Attackers can exploit this flaw to bypass filtering or execute arbitrary code by crafting a path like /~2/foo while accessing a server with a specific user.
An allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 based on the "chained" HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a server response can be compressed multiple times and potentially with differentalgorithms. The number of acceptable "links" in this "decompression chain" wascapped, but the cap was implemented on a per-header basis allowing a maliciousserver to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps simply byusing many headers. The use of such a decompression chain could result in a "malloc bomb", making curl end up spending enormous amounts of allocated heap memory, or trying to and returning out of memory errors.
A use after free vulnerability exists in curl <7.87.0. Curl can be asked to *tunnel* virtually all protocols it supports through an HTTP proxy. HTTP proxies can (and often do) deny such tunnel operations. When getting denied to tunnel the specific protocols SMB or TELNET, curl would use a heap-allocated struct after it had been freed, in its transfer shutdown code path.
When doing HTTP(S) transfers, libcurl might erroneously use the read callback (`CURLOPT_READFUNCTION`) to ask for data to send, even when the `CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS` option has been set, if the same handle previously was used to issue a `PUT` request which used that callback. This flaw may surprise the application and cause it to misbehave and either send off the wrong data or use memory after free or similar in the subsequent `POST` request. The problem exists in the logic for a reused handle when it is changed from a PUT to a POST.
When curl is used to retrieve and parse cookies from a HTTP(S) server, itaccepts cookies using control codes that when later are sent back to a HTTPserver might make the server return 400 responses. Effectively allowing a"sister site" to deny service to all siblings.
A malicious server can serve excessive amounts of `Set-Cookie:` headers in a HTTP response to curl and curl < 7.84.0 stores all of them. A sufficiently large amount of (big) cookies make subsequent HTTP requests to this, or other servers to which the cookies match, create requests that become larger than the threshold that curl uses internally to avoid sending crazy large requests (1048576 bytes) and instead returns an error.This denial state might remain for as long as the same cookies are kept, match and haven't expired. Due to cookie matching rules, a server on `foo.example.com` can set cookies that also would match for `bar.example.com`, making it it possible for a "sister server" to effectively cause a denial of service for a sibling site on the same second level domain using this method.
curl < 7.84.0 supports "chained" HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a serverresponse can be compressed multiple times and potentially with different algorithms. The number of acceptable "links" in this "decompression chain" was unbounded, allowing a malicious server to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps.The use of such a decompression chain could result in a "malloc bomb", makingcurl end up spending enormous amounts of allocated heap memory, or trying toand returning out of memory errors.
When curl < 7.84.0 saves cookies, alt-svc and hsts data to local files, it makes the operation atomic by finalizing the operation with a rename from a temporary name to the final target file name.In that rename operation, it might accidentally *widen* the permissions for the target file, leaving the updated file accessible to more users than intended.