curl library vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

Stefan Esser discovered several buffer overflows in the handling of
URLs. By attempting to load an URL with a specially crafted invalid
hostname, a local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary
code with the privileges of the application that uses the cURL
library.

It is not possible to trick cURL into loading a malicious URL with an
HTTP redirect, so this vulnerability was usually not exploitable
remotely. However, it could be exploited locally to e. g. circumvent
PHP security restrictions.