Maintainers of a Popular Open Source Tool Warns of Critical Curl Vulnerability

Two new vulnerabilities have been discovered in the widely used Curl tool. These two vulnerabilities are identified as CVE-2023-38545 and CVE-2023-38546. One of these vulnerabilities has a high severity, while the other has a low severity.

However, the Curl team has confirmed that they will release the security advisory and additional information about these vulnerabilities on October 11. These vulnerabilities are reported to be existing in the libcurl and curl tools.

“We are cutting the release cycle short and will release curl 8.4.0 on October 11, including fixes for a severity HIGH CVE and one severity LOW. The one rated HIGH is probably the worst curl security flaw in a long time.” reads the GitHub post of Curl.

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CVE-2023-38545 and CVE-2023-38546

CVE-2023-38545 was reported as a high-severity vulnerability that affects both libcurl and the curl tool. Details of this vulnerability are yet to be published. On the other hand, CVE-2023-38546 was reported as a low-severity vulnerability that affects libcurl only.

libcurl is considered the backbone of the Curl tool, which is a client-side URL transfer library that supports the same wide range of protocols. It has robust data transfer functionality and enables the Curl tool to communicate with servers to send HTTP requests, manage cookies, and handle authentication.

The current version of the Curl tool is 8.3.0, released on September 13, 2023. However, the upcoming release, 8.4.0, will be released sooner than expected due to the discovery of these vulnerabilities. It is also reported that this has been one of the most critical security flaws found recently in Curl.

Organizations are recommended to update Curl to the latest version once publicly released on October 11, 2023.

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