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CVE-2016-9953

Win CE Schannel cert name out of buffer read

Project curl Security Advisory, December 21, 2016 - Permalink

VULNERABILITY

curl's TLS server certificate checks are flawed on Windows CE.

This vulnerability occurs in the verify certificate function when comparing a wildcard certificate name (as returned by the Windows API function CertGetNameString() to the hostname used to make the connection to the server.

The pattern matching logic exhibits an out of bounds read. If the wildcard certificate name field is longer than the connection hostname, the wildcard comparison code performs an access out of bounds of the connection hostname heap based buffer. This issue could technically leak the contents of memory immediately preceding the connection hostname buffer, just a crash or at worst happen to match against another piece of data.

INFO

This vulnerability only happens on libcurl built for Windows CE using the Schannel TLS backend.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project has assigned the name CVE-2016-9953 to this issue.

CWE-126: Buffer Over-read

Severity: Medium

AFFECTED VERSIONS

This flaw exists in the following libcurl versions.

libcurl is used by many applications, but not always advertised as such!

SOLUTION

In version 7.52.0, the certificate check is changed to instead use the libcurl certificate verifying function used for a few other TLS backends that does not contain these flaws.

RECOMMENDATIONS

We suggest you take one of the following actions immediately, in order of preference:

A - Upgrade curl and libcurl to version 7.52.0

B - Apply the patch to your version and rebuild

C - Do not use the Schannel backend on Windows CE

TIMELINE

It was first reported to the curl project on November 29.

We contacted MITRE on December 13.

curl 7.52.0 was released on December 21 2016, coordinated with the publication of this advisory.

CREDITS

Thanks a lot!