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CURL-CVE-2018-16842

Published Oct 31, 2018·Last modified Apr 25, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

curl contains a heap out of buffer read vulnerability.

The command line tool has a generic function for displaying warning and informational messages to stderr for various situations. For example if an unknown command line argument is used, or passed to it in a "config" file.

This display function formats the output to wrap at 80 columns. The wrap logic is however flawed, so if a single word in the message is itself longer than 80 bytes the buffer arithmetic calculates the remainder wrong and ends up reading behind the end of the buffer. This could lead to information disclosure or crash.

This vulnerability could lead to a security issue if used in this or similar situations:

  1. a server somewhere uses the curl command line to run something
  2. if it fails, it shows stderr to the user
  3. the server takes user input for parts of its command line input
  4. user provides something overly long that triggers this crash
  5. the stderr output may now contain user memory contents that was not meant to be available
Risk Scores
Base Score
0.0

Measures severity based on intrinsic characteristics of the vulnerability, independent of environment.

Threat Intelligence
0.0

No exploitation activity has been observed at this time. Continue routine monitoring.

EPSS
2.10%

The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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