CVE-2023-23916

Publication date 15 February 2023

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

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.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
curl	23.04 lunar	Fixed 7.87.0-2ubuntu1
	22.10 kinetic	Fixed 7.85.0-1ubuntu0.3
	22.04 LTS jammy	Fixed 7.81.0-1ubuntu1.8
	20.04 LTS focal	Fixed 7.68.0-1ubuntu2.16
	18.04 LTS bionic	Fixed 7.58.0-2ubuntu3.23
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not affected

Notes

mdeslaur

introduced in 7.57.0

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
curl	Upstream: 119fb18

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	6.5 · Medium
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

USN-5891-1
curl vulnerabilities
27 February 2023