CVE-2023-38545

State
Published
Severity
8.8 High
Published
Oct 18, 2023
Updated
Oct 14, 2026
Reserved
Jul 20, 2023

Read the record on cve.org

Description

This flaw makes curl overflow a heap based buffer in the SOCKS5 proxy handshake.

When curl is asked to pass along the host name to the SOCKS5 proxy to allow that to resolve the address instead of it getting done by curl itself, the maximum length that host name can be is 255 bytes.

If the host name is detected to be longer, curl switches to local name resolving and instead passes on the resolved address only. Due to this bug, the local variable that means "let the host resolve the name" could get the wrong value during a slow SOCKS5 handshake, and contrary to the intention, copy the too long host name to the target buffer instead of copying just the resolved address there.

The target buffer being a heap based buffer, and the host name coming from the URL that curl has been told to operate with.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.18.8 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HCISA-ADP

Weaknesses

Affected Products

ProductVersions
curlcurl
  • 8.4.0 to before 8.4.0Affected
  • 7.69.0 to before 7.69.0Not affected

References

Every record here comes from the CVE Program’s CVE List. © 1999–2026 The MITRE Corporation. CVE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. The records are reproduced under the CVE Program terms of use.