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Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

CVE-2023-23916

Severity Medium
Score 6.5/10

Summary

An allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability exists in curl 7.57.0 through 7.87.0 based on the "chained" HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a server response can be compressed multiple times and potentially with different algorithms. The number of acceptable "links" in this "decompression chain" was capped, but the cap was implemented on a per-header basis allowing a malicious server to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps simply by using 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.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-770 - Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

The software allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated, in violation of the intended security policy for that actor.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published