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Use After Free

CVE-2021-22901

Severity High
Score 8.1/10

Summary

curl 7.75.0 through 7.76.1 suffers from a use-after-free vulnerability resulting in already freed memory being used when a TLS 1.3 session ticket arrives over a connection. A malicious server can use this in rare unfortunate circumstances to potentially reach remote code execution in the client. When libcurl at run-time sets up support for TLS 1.3 session tickets on a connection using OpenSSL, it stores pointers to the transfer in-memory object for later retrieval when a session ticket arrives. If the connection is used by multiple transfers (like with a reused HTTP/1.1 connection or multiplexed HTTP/2 connection) that first transfer object might be freed before the new session is established on that connection and then the function will access a memory buffer that might be freed. When using that memory, libcurl might even call a function pointer in the object, making it possible for a remote code execution if the server could somehow manage to get crafted memory content into the correct place in memory.

  • HIGH
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-416 - Use After Free

Use-after-free (UaF) vulnerability occurs when the application is using a pointer to memory that has been freed. Any attempt to read/write to a buffer after it is de-allocated allows memory corruption, sensitive information exposure, and can potentially lead to arbitrary code execution.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published