Unlimited Resource Allocation Vulnerability in curl <v7.88.0

CVE-2023-23916 · MEDIUM Severity

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

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.

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