CVE Catalog

CVE-2023-23916

MediumCVSS 6.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

High risk
1.74%

78th 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
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