this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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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

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[–] Backslash@feddit.de 45 points 1 year ago

Reading the blog post, it's a lot more nuanced than that: someone reported a CVE, which was related to a possible int overflow in client code handling the timeout between requests. NVD chose to grade this as a 9.8/10 on their severity scale (for context, CVE-2014-0160, also known as Heartbleed, got a 7.5/10), which is ludicrous for a bug which could at most change the retry timeout of your request from your intended years to a few seconds. Daniel says that this is not a security vulnerability at all and has no business being listed on the CVE database, whereas NVD argues that it's a bug, it's been reported to them and because overflows are undefined behavior, anything can happen and so it's a security vulnerability.

In the end, they agreed to at least adjust the severity down to a 3.3, but I can understand that Daniel is still somewhat miffed about it. Personally I also agree that it's not really a security issue and that even a 3.3 is too high in terms of severity.