Curl
CVE-2023-28320
MEDIUM
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A06:2025 - Insecure Design
ASVS 5.0
V2 - Validation and Business Logic Resource consumption limits
MITRE ATT&CK
1 technique across 1 tactic: Impact The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Impact | CVSS score of 5.9 (MEDIUM). Attack characteristics: network attack vector, high complexity, no privileges required, no user interaction not required. Public proof-of-concept exploit code is available. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | A remote attacker could cause denial of service by exhausting system resources by sending crafted requests to the affected application. No authentication is required to exploit this vulnerability. |
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Alert meAnalysisAI
A denial of service vulnerability exists in curl <v8.1.0 in the way libcurl provides several different backends for resolving host names, selected at build time. Rated medium severity (CVSS 5.9), this vulnerability is remotely exploitable, no authentication required. Public exploit code available and no vendor patch available.
RemediationAI
No vendor patch is available at time of analysis. Monitor vendor advisories for updates. Implement rate limiting, set resource quotas, validate input sizes, use timeouts.
Affects your stack
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Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
This vulnerability is classified as Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400), which allows attackers to cause denial of service by exhausting system resources. A denial of service vulnerability exists in curl <v8.1.0 in the way libcurl provides several different backends for resolving host names, selected at build time. If it is built to use the synchronous resolver, it allows name resolves to time-out slow operations using alarm() and siglongjmp(). When doing this, libcurl used a global buffer that was not mutex protected and a multi-threaded application might therefore crash or otherwise misbehave. Affected products include: Haxx Curl, Apple Macos, Netapp Clustered Data Ontap, Netapp Ontap Antivirus Connector, Netapp H300S Firmware.
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- Exploit and PoC references, threat intelligence from 22 sources
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Severity by source
AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Primary rating from NVD · only source for this CVE.
CVSS VectorNVD
DescriptionNVD
A denial of service vulnerability exists in curl <v8.1.0 in the way libcurl provides several different backends for resolving host names, selected at build time. If it is built to use the synchronous resolver, it allows name resolves to time-out slow operations using alarm() and siglongjmp(). When doing this, libcurl used a global buffer that was not mutex protected and a multi-threaded application might therefore crash or otherwise misbehave.
Threat Intelligence Overview
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
VulDB
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Denial of Service attacks render applications or systems unavailable by overwhelming resources or triggering failure conditions.
Affected Products (CPE)NVD
curl 7.75.0 through 7.76.1 suffers from a use-after-free vulnerability resulting in already freed memory being used when
Stack-based buffer overflow in the Curl_sasl_create_digest_md5_message function in lib/curl_sasl.c in curl and libcurl 7
The sanitize_cookie_path function in cURL and libcurl 7.31.0 through 7.41.0 does not properly calculate an index, which
curl < 7.84.0 supports "chained" HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a serverresponse can be compressed multiple t
When curl < 7.84.0 saves cookies, alt-svc and hsts data to local files, it makes the operation atomic by finalizing the
A vulnerability exists in curl <7.87.0 HSTS check that could be bypassed to trick it to keep using HTTP. Rated high seve
When doing HTTP(S) transfers, libcurl might erroneously use the read callback (`CURLOPT_READFUNCTION`) to ask for data t
Curl_smtp_escape_eob in lib/smtp.c in curl 7.54.1 to and including curl 7.60.0 has a heap-based buffer overflow that mig
A malicious server can serve excessive amounts of `Set-Cookie:` headers in a HTTP response to curl and curl < 7.84.0 sto
1. Rated high severity (CVSS 7.5), this vulnerability is remotely exploitable, no authentication required, low attack co
A cleartext transmission of sensitive information vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 that could cause HSTS functional
A path traversal vulnerability exists in curl <8.0.0 SFTP implementation causes the tilde (~) character to be wrongly re
GitHub PoC
Exploit-DB