Haxx: Security Vulnerabilities
libcurl accidentally skips the certificate verification for QUIC connections when connecting to a host specified as an IP address in the URL. Therefore, it does not detect impostors or man-in-the-middle attacks.
CVSS Score
6.5
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2025-05-28
When libcurl is asked to perform automatic gzip decompression of
content-encoded HTTP responses with the `CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING` option,
**using zlib 1.2.0.3 or older**, an attacker-controlled integer overflow would
make libcurl perform a buffer overflow.
CVSS Score
7.3
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2025-02-05
When curl is asked to use HSTS, the expiry time for a subdomain might
overwrite a parent domain's cache entry, making it end sooner or later than
otherwise intended.
This affects curl using applications that enable HSTS and use URLs with the
insecure `HTTP://` scheme and perform transfers with hosts like
`x.example.com` as well as `example.com` where the first host is a subdomain
of the second host.
(The HSTS cache either needs to have been populated manually or there needs to
have been previous HTTPS accesses done as the cache needs to have entries for
the domains involved to trigger this problem.)
When `x.example.com` responds with `Strict-Transport-Security:` headers, this
bug can make the subdomain's expiry timeout *bleed over* and get set for the
parent domain `example.com` in curl's HSTS cache.
The result of a triggered bug is that HTTP accesses to `example.com` get
converted to HTTPS for a different period of time than what was asked for by
the origin server. If `example.com` for example stops supporting HTTPS at its
expiry time, curl might then fail to access `http://example.com` until the
(wrongly set) timeout expires. This bug can also expire the parent's entry
*earlier*, thus making curl inadvertently switch back to insecure HTTP earlier
than otherwise intended.
CVSS Score
6.5
EPSS Score
0.003
Published
2024-11-06
The libcurl CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER option was disabled on a subset of requests made by Nest production devices which enabled a potential man-in-the-middle attack on requests to Google cloud services by any host the traffic was routed through.
CVSS Score
5.9
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2024-08-19
libcurl's ASN1 parser code has the `GTime2str()` function, used for parsing an
ASN.1 Generalized Time field. If given an syntactically incorrect field, the
parser might end up using -1 for the length of the *time fraction*, leading to
a `strlen()` getting performed on a pointer to a heap buffer area that is not
(purposely) null terminated.
This flaw most likely leads to a crash, but can also lead to heap contents
getting returned to the application when
[CURLINFO_CERTINFO](https://curl.se/libcurl/c/CURLINFO_CERTINFO.html) is used.
CVSS Score
6.5
EPSS Score
0.026
Published
2024-07-31
libcurl's ASN1 parser has this utf8asn1str() function used for parsing an ASN.1 UTF-8 string. Itcan detect an invalid field and return error. Unfortunately, when doing so it also invokes `free()` on a 4 byte localstack buffer. Most modern malloc implementations detect this error and immediately abort. Some however accept the input pointer and add that memory to its list of available chunks. This leads to the overwriting of nearby stack memory. The content of the overwrite is decided by the `free()` implementation; likely to be memory pointers and a set of flags. The most likely outcome of exploting this flaw is a crash, although it cannot be ruled out that more serious results can be had in special circumstances.
CVSS Score
7.5
EPSS Score
0.034
Published
2024-07-24
libcurl's URL API function
[curl_url_get()](https://curl.se/libcurl/c/curl_url_get.html) offers punycode
conversions, to and from IDN. Asking to convert a name that is exactly 256
bytes, libcurl ends up reading outside of a stack based buffer when built to
use the *macidn* IDN backend. The conversion function then fills up the
provided buffer exactly - but does not null terminate the string.
This flaw can lead to stack contents accidently getting returned as part of
the converted string.
CVSS Score
4.3
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2024-07-24
curl inadvertently kept the SSL session ID for connections in its cache even when the verify status (*OCSP stapling*) test failed. A subsequent transfer to
the same hostname could then succeed if the session ID cache was still fresh, which then skipped the verify status check.
CVSS Score
5.3
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2024-02-03
When saving HSTS data to an excessively long file name, curl could end up
removing all contents, making subsequent requests using that file unaware of
the HSTS status they should otherwise use.
CVSS Score
5.3
EPSS Score
0.002
Published
2023-12-12
This flaw allows a malicious HTTP server to set "super cookies" in curl that
are then passed back to more origins than what is otherwise allowed or
possible. This allows a site to set cookies that then would get sent to
different and unrelated sites and domains.
It could do this by exploiting a mixed case flaw in curl's function that
verifies a given cookie domain against the Public Suffix List (PSL). For
example a cookie could be set with `domain=co.UK` when the URL used a lower
case hostname `curl.co.uk`, even though `co.uk` is listed as a PSL domain.
CVSS Score
6.5
EPSS Score
0.004
Published
2023-12-07
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