Libcurl vulnerabilities

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.

When using `CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY` option with libcurl or `--pinnedpubkey` with the curl tool,curl should check the public key of the server certificate to verify the peer. This check was skipped in a certain condition that would then make curl allow the connection without performing the proper check, thus not noticing a possible impostor. To skip this check, the connection had to be done with QUIC with ngtcp2 built to use GnuTLS and the user had to explicitly disable the standard certificate verification.

When doing multi-threaded LDAPS transfers (LDAP over TLS) with libcurl, changing TLS options in one thread would inadvertently change them globally and therefore possibly also affect other concurrently setup transfers. Disabling certificate verification for a specific transfer could unintentionally disable the feature for other threads as well.

Due to a mistake in libcurl's WebSocket code, a malicious server can send a particularly crafted packet which makes libcurl get trapped in an endless busy-loop. There is no other way for the application to escape or exit this loop other than killing the thread/process. This might be used to DoS libcurl-using application.

libcurl supports *pinning* of the server certificate public key for HTTPS transfers. Due to an omission, this check is not performed when connecting with QUIC for HTTP/3, when the TLS backend is wolfSSL. Documentation says the option works with wolfSSL, failing to specify that it does not for QUIC and HTTP/3. Since pinning makes the transfer succeed if the pin is fine, users could unwittingly connect to an impostor server without noticing.

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.

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.

libcurl would wrongly close the same eventfd file descriptor twice when taking down a connection channel after having completed a threaded name resolve.

When curl is told to use the Certificate Status Request TLS extension, often referred to as OCSP stapling, to verify that the server certificate is valid, it might fail to detect some OCSP problems and instead wrongly consider the response as fine. If the returned status reports another error than 'revoked' (like for example 'unauthorized') it is not treated as a bad certficate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

libcurl did not check the server certificate of TLS connections done to a host specified as an IP address, when built to use mbedTLS. libcurl would wrongly avoid using the set hostname function when the specified hostname was given as an IP address, therefore completely skipping the certificate check. This affects all uses of TLS protocols (HTTPS, FTPS, IMAPS, POPS3, SMTPS, etc).

When an application tells libcurl it wants to allow HTTP/2 server push, and the amount of received headers for the push surpasses the maximum allowed limit (1000), libcurl aborts the server push. When aborting, libcurl inadvertently does not free all the previously allocated headers and instead leaks the memory. Further, this error condition fails silently and is therefore not easily detected by an application.

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.

This flaw allows an attacker to insert cookies at will into a running program using libcurl, if the specific series of conditions are met. libcurl performs transfers. In its API, an application creates "easy handles" that are the individual handles for single transfers. libcurl provides a function call that duplicates en easy handle called [curl_easy_duphandle](https://curl.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_duphandle.html). If a transfer has cookies enabled when the handle is duplicated, the cookie-enable state is also cloned - but without cloning the actual cookies. If the source handle did not read any cookies from a specific file on disk, the cloned version of the handle would instead store the file name as `none` (using the four ASCII letters, no quotes). Subsequent use of the cloned handle that does not explicitly set a source to load cookies from would then inadvertently load cookies from a file named `none` - if such a file exists and is readable in the current directory of the program using libcurl. And if using the correct file format of course.

This flaw makes curl overflow a heap based buffer in the SOCKS5 proxy handshake. When curl is asked to pass along the host name to the SOCKS5 proxy to allow that to resolve the address instead of it getting done by curl itself, the maximum length that host name can be is 255 bytes. If the host name is detected to be longer, curl switches to local name resolving and instead passes on the resolved address only. Due to this bug, the local variable that means "let the host resolve the name" could get the wrong value during a slow SOCKS5 handshake, and contrary to the intention, copy the too long host name to the target buffer instead of copying just the resolved address there. The target buffer being a heap based buffer, and the host name coming from the URL that curl has been told to operate with.

When curl retrieves an HTTP response, it stores the incoming headers so that they can be accessed later via the libcurl headers API. However, curl did not have a limit in how many or how large headers it would accept in a response, allowing a malicious server to stream an endless series of headers and eventually cause curl to run out of heap memory.

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.

An authentication bypass vulnerability exists in libcurl <8.0.0 in the FTP connection reuse feature that can result in wrong credentials being used during subsequent transfers. Previously created connections are kept in a connection pool for reuse if they match the current setup. However, certain FTP settings such as CURLOPT_FTP_ACCOUNT, CURLOPT_FTP_ALTERNATIVE_TO_USER, CURLOPT_FTP_SSL_CCC, and CURLOPT_USE_SSL were not included in the configuration match checks, causing them to match too easily. This could lead to libcurl using the wrong credentials when performing a transfer, potentially allowing unauthorized access to sensitive information.

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.

curl before 7.86.0 has a double free. If curl is told to use an HTTP proxy for a transfer with a non-HTTP(S) URL, it sets up the connection to the remote server by issuing a CONNECT request to the proxy, and then tunnels the rest of the protocol through. An HTTP proxy might refuse this request (HTTP proxies often only allow outgoing connections to specific port numbers, like 443 for HTTPS) and instead return a non-200 status code to the client. Due to flaws in the error/cleanup handling, this could trigger a double free in curl if one of the following schemes were used in the URL for the transfer: dict, gopher, gophers, ldap, ldaps, rtmp, rtmps, or telnet. The earliest affected version is 7.77.0.

libcurl would reuse a previously created connection even when a TLS or SSHrelated option had been changed that should have prohibited reuse.libcurl keeps previously used connections in a connection pool for subsequenttransfers to reuse if one of them matches the setup. However, several TLS andSSH settings were left out from the configuration match checks, making themmatch too easily.

curl 7.75.0 through 7.76.1 suffers from a use-after-free vulnerability resulting in already freed memory being used when a TLS 1.3 session ticket arrives over a connection. A malicious server can use this in rare unfortunate circumstances to potentially reach remote code execution in the client. When libcurl at run-time sets up support for TLS 1.3 session tickets on a connection using OpenSSL, it stores pointers to the transfer in-memory object for later retrieval when a session ticket arrives. If the connection is used by multiple transfers (like with a reused HTTP/1.1 connection or multiplexed HTTP/2 connection) that first transfer object might be freed before the new session is established on that connection and then the function will access a memory buffer that might be freed. When using that memory, libcurl might even call a function pointer in the object, making it possible for a remote code execution if the server could somehow manage to get crafted memory content into the correct place in memory.

curl 7.7 through 7.76.1 suffers from an information disclosure when the `-t` command line option, known as `CURLOPT_TELNETOPTIONS` in libcurl, is used to send variable=content pairs to TELNET servers. Due to a flaw in the option parser for sending NEW_ENV variables, libcurl could be made to pass on uninitialized data from a stack based buffer to the server, resulting in potentially revealing sensitive internal information to the server using a clear-text network protocol.

curl 7.41.0 through 7.73.0 is vulnerable to an improper check for certificate revocation due to insufficient verification of the OCSP response.

Due to use of a dangling pointer, libcurl 7.29.0 through 7.71.1 can use the wrong connection when sending data.