FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

curl -- multiple vulnerabilities

Affected packages
curl < 7.88.0

Details

VuXML ID be233fc6-bae7-11ed-a4fb-080027f5fec9
Discovery 2023-02-15
Entry 2023-03-05

Harry Sintonen and Patrick Monnerat report:

CVE-2023-23914
A cleartext transmission of sensitive information vulnerability exists in curl < v7.88.0 that could cause HSTS functionality fail when multiple URLs are requested serially. 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 be ignored by subsequent transfers when done on the same command line because the state would not be properly carried on.
CVE-2023-23915
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 recently completed transfer. A later HTTP-only transfer to the earlier host name would then *not* get upgraded properly to HSTS.
CVE-2023-23916
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 different algorithms. The number of acceptable "links" in this "decompression chain" was capped, but the cap was implemented on a per-header basis allowing a malicious server to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps simply by using 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.

References

CVE Name CVE-2023-23914
CVE Name CVE-2023-23915
CVE Name CVE-2023-23916
URL https://curl.se/docs/security.html