CVE-2023-23915

Published Feb 23, 2023

Last updated 3 months ago

CVSS medium 6.5

Overview

Description
A cleartext transmission of sensitive information vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 that could cause HSTS functionality to behave incorrectly when multiple URLs are requested in parallel. Using its HSTS support, curl can be instructed to use HTTPS instead of using an insecure clear-text HTTP step even when HTTP is provided in the URL. This HSTS mechanism would however surprisingly fail when multiple transfers are done in parallel as the HSTS cache file gets overwritten by the most recentlycompleted transfer. A later HTTP-only transfer to the earlier host name would then *not* get upgraded properly to HSTS.
Source
support@hackerone.com
NVD status
Modified
Products
curl, active_iq_unified_manager, clustered_data_ontap, h300s_firmware, h500s_firmware, h700s_firmware, h410s_firmware, universal_forwarder

Risk scores

CVSS 3.1

Type
Primary
Base score
6.5
Impact score
2.5
Exploitability score
3.9
Vector string
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
Severity
MEDIUM

Weaknesses

support@hackerone.com
CWE-319
nvd@nist.gov
CWE-319

Social media

Hype score
Not currently trending

Configurations

Related CVEs

  1. When an OAuth2 bearer token is used for an HTTP(S) transfer, and that transfer performs a redirect to a second URL, curl could leak that token to the second hostname under some circumstances. If the hostname that the first request is redirected to has information in the used .netrc file, with either of the `machine` or `default` keywords, curl would pass on the bearer token set for the first host also to the second one.•CVE-2026-3783
  2. When doing a second SMB request to the same host again, curl would wrongly use a data pointer pointing into already freed memory.•CVE-2026-3805
  3. curl would wrongly reuse an existing HTTP proxy connection doing CONNECT to a server, even if the new request uses different credentials for the HTTP proxy. The proper behavior is to create or use a separate connection.•CVE-2026-3784
  4. libcurl can in some circumstances reuse the wrong connection when asked to do an Negotiate-authenticated HTTP or HTTPS request. libcurl features a pool of recent connections so that subsequent requests can reuse an existing connection to avoid overhead. When reusing a connection a range of criterion must first be met. Due to a logical error in the code, a request that was issued by an application could wrongfully reuse an existing connection to the same server that was authenticated using different credentials. One underlying reason being that Negotiate sometimes authenticates *connections* and not *requests*, contrary to how HTTP is designed to work. An application that allows Negotiate authentication to a server (that responds wanting Negotiate) with `user1:password1` and then does another operation to the same server also using Negotiate but with `user2:password2` (while the previous connection is still alive) - the second request wrongly reused the same connection and since it then sees that the Negotiate negotiation is already made, it just sends the request over that connection thinking it uses the user2 credentials when it is in fact still using the connection authenticated for user1... The set of authentication methods to use is set with `CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH`. Applications can disable libcurl's reuse of connections and thus mitigate this problem, by using one of the following libcurl options to alter how connections are or are not reused: `CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT`, `CURLOPT_MAXCONNECTS` and `CURLMOPT_MAX_HOST_CONNECTIONS` (if using the curl_multi API).•CVE-2026-1965
  5. When doing SSH-based transfers using either SCP or SFTP, and asked to do public key authentication, curl would wrongly still ask and authenticate using a locally running SSH agent.•CVE-2025-15224

References

Sources include official advisories and independent security research.