[ GLSA 200512-09 ] cURL: Off-by-one errors in URL handling

[GLSA]

Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Title: cURL: Off-by-one errors in URL handling (GLSA 200512-09)
Severity: low
Exploitable: local
Date: December 16, 2005
Bug(s): #114710
ID: 200512-09

Synopsis


cURL is vulnerable to local arbitrary code execution via buffer overflow
due to the insecure parsing of URLs.


Background


cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL
syntax, supporting numerous protocols.


Affected Packages

Package: net-misc/curl
Vulnerable: < 7.15.1
Unaffected: >= 7.15.1
Architectures: All supported architectures


Description


Stefan Esser from the Hardened-PHP Project has reported a
vulnerability in cURL that allows for a local buffer overflow when cURL
attempts to parse specially crafted URLs. The URL can be specially
crafted in one of two ways: the URL could be malformed in a way that
prevents a terminating null byte from being added to either a hostname
or path buffer; or the URL could contain a "?" separator in the
hostname portion, which causes a "/" to be prepended to the resulting
string.


Impact


An attacker capable of getting cURL to parse a maliciously crafted
URL could cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user making the call to cURL. An attacker could also
escape open_basedir or safe_mode pseudo-restrictions when exploiting
this problem from within a PHP program when PHP is compiled with
libcurl.


Workaround


There is no known workaround at this time.


Resolution


All cURL users should upgrade to the latest version: