cURL up to 8.3.0 SOCKS5 Proxy heap-based overflow

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability has been found in cURL up to 8.3.0 and classified as critical. This affects an unknown function of the component SOCKS5 Proxy Handler. This manipulation causes heap-based overflow. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2023-38545. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. Furthermore, there is an exploit available. The affected component should be upgraded.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in cURL up to 8.3.0 (Network Utility Software). It has been declared as critical. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown part of the component SOCKS5 Proxy Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a heap-based overflow vulnerability. The CWE definition for the vulnerability is CWE-122. A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc(). As an impact it is known to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

The weakness was shared 10/11/2023. The advisory is shared at curl.se. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2023-38545. It demands that the victim is doing some kind of user interaction. Technical details are unknown but a public exploit is available.

A public exploit has been developed in Bash and been published 5 days after the advisory. It is possible to download the exploit at github.com. It is declared as proof-of-concept. The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 210338 (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OAS 7.0) (October 2024 CPU)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment. The code used by the exploit is:

#!/bin/bash
printf "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently\nLocation: http:///$(printf 'A%.0s' {0..60000})/\nContent-Length: 0\nConnection: close\n\n" | nc -C -nvlp 8000 &
curl -L --limit-rate 32768 -x socks5h://localhost:10801 localhost:8000

Upgrading to version 8.4.0 eliminates this vulnerability. The upgrade is hosted for download at curl.se.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at Tenable (210338). If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

Productinfo

Type

• Network Utility Software

Name

• cURL

Version

• 8.0
• 8.1
• 8.2
• 8.3.0

License

• open-source

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CPE 2.2info

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If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

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