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CVE-2016-8616 Moderate

case insensitive password comparison

When reusing a connection, curl was doing case insensitive comparisons of username and password with the existing connections. This means that if an unused connection with proper credentials exists for a protocol that has connection-scoped credentials, an attacker can cause that connection to be reused if s/he knows the case-insensitive version of the correct password.

Exploit probability 3.5%
Published November 2, 2016
Required by Not available
Last source change April 25, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Unknown Unknown

139 explicit affected versions

Unknown Unknown

108 explicit affected versions

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities CVE-2016-8616

A flaw was found in curl before version 7.51.0 When re-using a connection, curl was doing case insensitive comparisons of user name and password with the existing connections. This means that if an unused connection with proper credentials exists for a protocol that has connection-scoped credentials, an attacker can cause that connection to be reused if s/he knows the case-insensitive version of the correct password.

View original source
Open Source Vulnerabilities CURL-CVE-2016-8616

When reusing a connection, curl was doing case insensitive comparisons of username and password with the existing connections. This means that if an unused connection with proper credentials exists for a protocol that has connection-scoped credentials, an attacker can cause that connection to be reused if s/he knows the case-insensitive version of the correct password.

View original source

05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence