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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS / 22.04 LTS : curl vulnerabilities (USN-5891-1)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 171942

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Synopsis

The remote Ubuntu host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

The remote Ubuntu 18.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS / 22.04 LTS / 22.10 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the USN-5891-1 advisory.

 - A cleartext transmission of sensitive information vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 that could cause HSTS functionality fail when multiple URLs are requested serially. Using its HSTS support, curl can be instructed to use HTTPS instead of usingan insecure clear-text HTTP step even when HTTP is provided in the URL. ThisHSTS mechanism would however surprisingly be ignored by subsequent transferswhen done on the same command line because the state would not be properlycarried on. (CVE-2023-23914)

 - A cleartext transmission of sensitive information vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 that could cause HSTS functionality to behave incorrectly when multiple URLs are requested in parallel. Using its HSTS support, curl can be instructed to use HTTPS instead of using an insecure clear-text HTTP step even when HTTP is provided in the URL. This HSTS mechanism would however surprisingly fail when multiple transfers are done in parallel as the HSTS cache file gets overwritten by the most recentlycompleted transfer. A later HTTP-only transfer to the earlier host name would then *not* get upgraded properly to HSTS.
 (CVE-2023-23915)

 - An allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 based on the chained HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a server response can be compressed multiple times and potentially with differentalgorithms. The number of acceptable links in this decompression chain wascapped, but the cap was implemented on a per-header basis allowing a maliciousserver to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps simply byusing 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. (CVE-2023-23916)

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the affected packages.

See Also

https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5891-1

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 171942

File Name: ubuntu_USN-5891-1.nasl

Version: 1.4

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 2/28/2023

Updated: 10/16/2023

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.0

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 9.4

Temporal Score: 7.4

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2023-23914

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 9.1

Temporal Score: 8.2

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:22.04:-:lts, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:curl, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libcurl3-gnutls, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:-:lts, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libcurl4, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libcurl4-nss-dev, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libcurl4-openssl-dev, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libcurl4-gnutls-dev, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:20.04:-:lts, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libcurl3-nss

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/Ubuntu, Host/Ubuntu/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 2/27/2023

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/5/2023

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2023-23914, CVE-2023-23915, CVE-2023-23916

IAVA: 2023-A-0008-S, 2023-A-0108-S

USN: 5891-1