CVE-2023-23916
MediumCVSS 6.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
High risk78th percentile - higher than 78% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability in curl before 7.88.0 involves unlimited decompression steps in chained HTTP compression algorithms. The limit was applied per-header, allowing a malicious server to insert virtually unlimited compression steps, resulting in a malloc bomb and excessive heap memory allocation.
Risk Assessment
A malicious server can exhaust heap memory in applications using curl, causing crashes or denial of service. Systems fetching data from untrusted HTTP sources are at risk.
Recommendation
Update curl to version 7.88.0 or later. If updating is not possible, restrict communication with untrusted HTTP servers.
Other vulnerabilities in curl
See all- CVE-2024-9681Medium
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 applications using HSTS and URLs with the insecure HTTP:// scheme.
- CVE-2026-94265Critical
When processing an HTTP redirect to a URL containing userinfo (a username:password component), curl might erroneously retain and re-transmit the original host's HTTP Negotiate authentication state. Consequently, a malicious server can trigger a redirect containing arbitrary userinfo to force curl to send a freshly minted Kerberos ticket to an untrusted third-party host, effectively bypassing the domain-scoping restrictions normally enforced by the absence of --location-trusted.
- CVE-2026-87866Critical
When built with wolfSSL, curl can successfully validate a pinned public key hash against a key the TLS peer does not possess. During the TLS handshake, wolfSSL validates the connection, but curl's subsequent re-parsing of the same certificate, tricked by a manipulated validity length field, extracts and matches a different embedded key, incorrectly authorizing the pinned public key.
- CVE-2026-87861Critical
When using ambient user credentials, an HTTP request directed to one origin may be dispatched over a connection previously authenticated via Negotiate for a different origin, leaving the request's intended credentials unused.
- CVE-2026-86414Critical
An HTTP proxy can trick libcurl into sending the origin's credentials (Basic password or a Negotiate/Kerberos ticket) to the proxy itself by answering the CONNECT tunnel request with 401 WWW-Authenticate instead of the expected 407 Proxy-Authenticate.
- CVE-2026-86413Critical
When using an ambient user in a first transfer doing Negotiate authentication and asked to follow redirects, curl could pass on its credential details to an unrelated second origin when asked to redirect there.
- CVE-2026-86411Critical
An ftp:// transfer configured with CURLUSESSL_NONE can reuse a pooled FTP control connection that a previous easy handle upgraded with STARTTLS and authenticated using a client certificate. The second handle performs neither a new TLS handshake nor a new FTP login, so the server continues to authorize it under the first handle's certificate identity.
- CVE-2026-8926Critical
When curl uses a .netrc file for credentials and a URL with a username (without password) is specified, curl may wrongly retrieve and use the password of another user from .netrc for that host if no match exists for the specified user.
- CVE-2026-8925Critical
A double-free vulnerability has been found in the curl library's SASL authentication handling. The GSASL context is cleaned up twice without clearing the pointer, causing free() to be called on the same memory region twice.
- CVE-2026-8924Critical
A flaw in curl's cookie parsing logic allows a malicious HTTP server to set "super cookies" that bypass the Public Suffix List check, enabling injection of cookies that curl scopes and sends to unrelated third-party domains.
Original NVD description (English source)
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.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

