RHSA-2026:55450

When doing TLS related transfers with reused easy or multi handles and altering the `CURLSSLOPT_NO_PARTIALCHAIN` option, libcurl could accidentally reuse a CA store cached in memory for which the partial chain option was reversed. Contrary to the user's wishes and expectations. This could make libcurl find and accept a trust chain that it otherwise would not.

When a user invokes curl using a schemeless URL combined with `--proto-default` sftp (or scp), a disconnect occurs between the tool layer and libcurl. The tool layer incorrectly infers the URL scheme, which erroneously bypasses the initialization of critical SSH security options like CURLOPT_SSH_HOST_PUBLIC_KEY_SHA256 and CURLOPT_SSH_KNOWNHOSTS. Conversely, the libcurl runtime successfully honors CURLOPT_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL and establishes the connection via SFTP/SCP as specified. Because the tool layer skipped the security configuration, these SSH host verification options are silently omitted, causing curl to connect to an unverified SSH remote host without throwing an error.

libcurl can in some circumstances reuse the wrong connection when asked to do an Negotiate-authenticated HTTP or HTTPS request. libcurl features a pool of recent connections so that subsequent requests can reuse an existing connection to avoid overhead. When reusing a connection a range of criterion must first be met. Due to a logical error in the code, a request that was issued by an application could wrongfully reuse an existing connection to the same server that was authenticated using different credentials. One underlying reason being that Negotiate sometimes authenticates *connections* and not *requests*, contrary to how HTTP is designed to work. An application that allows Negotiate authentication to a server (that responds wanting Negotiate) with `user1:password1` and then does another operation to the same server also using Negotiate but with `user2:password2` (while the previous connection is still alive) - the second request wrongly reused the same connection and since it then sees that the Negotiate negotiation is already made, it sends the request over that connection thinking it uses the user2 credentials when it is in fact still using the connection authenticated for user1... The set of authentication methods to use is set with `CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH`. Applications can disable libcurl's reuse of connections and thus mitigate this problem, by using one of the following libcurl options to alter how connections are or are not reused: `CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT`, `CURLOPT_MAXCONNECTS` and `CURLMOPT_MAX_HOST_CONNECTIONS` (if using the curl_multi API).

When an OAuth2 bearer token is used for an HTTP(S) transfer, and that transfer performs a redirect to a second URL, curl could leak that token to the second hostname under some circumstances. If the hostname that the first request is redirected to has information in the used .netrc file, with either of the `machine` or `default` keywords, curl would pass on the bearer token set for the first host also to the second one.

curl would wrongly reuse an existing HTTP proxy connection doing CONNECT to a server, even if the new request uses different credentials for the HTTP proxy. The proper behavior is to create or use a separate connection.

A vulnerability exists where a new transfer that uses STARTTLS to upgrade the connection might reuse an existing live connection even though the TLS configuration mismatches so it should not.

When a libcurl-based application performs transfers via `SCP://` or `SFTP://` and utilizes the `CURLOPT_SSH_KEYFUNCTION` callback, it may silently accept an untrusted server. This vulnerability occurs when a server presents a host key type that does not match the specific key type already recorded for that host in the `known_hosts` file. Instead of rejecting the mismatch, the callback mechanism fails to properly enforce the restriction, allowing the connection to succeed without warning and risking a potential man-in-the-middle attack.