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CVE-2014-0015 Moderate

CVE-2014-0015

cURL and libcurl 7.10.6 through 7.34.0, when more than one authentication method is enabled, re-uses NTLM connections, which might allow context-dependent attackers to authenticate as other users via a request.

Exploit probability 5.6%
Published February 2, 2014
Required by Not available
Last source change April 16, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Unknown Unknown

131 explicit affected versions

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities CURL-CVE-2014-0015

libcurl can in some circumstances reuse the wrong connection when asked to do an NTLM-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 NTLM authenticates connections and not requests, contrary to how HTTP is designed to work and how other authentication methods work. An application that allows NTLM and another auth method (the bug only triggers if more than one auth method is asked for) to a server (that responds wanting NTLM) with user1:password1 and then does another operation to the same server with user2:password2 (when the previous connection was left alive) - the second request reuses the same connection and since it then sees that the NTLM 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 auth methods to use is set with `CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH`. Two common auth defines in libcurl are `CURLAUTH_ANY` and `CURLAUTH_ANYSAFE`. Both of them ask for NTLM and other methods and can therefore trigger this problem. 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).

View original source
Open Source Vulnerabilities CVE-2014-0015

cURL and libcurl 7.10.6 through 7.34.0, when more than one authentication method is enabled, re-uses NTLM connections, which might allow context-dependent attackers to authenticate as other users via a request.

View original source

05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence