CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-38039 — When curl retrieves an HTTP response, it stores the incoming headers so that they can be accessed later via the libcurl headers API

High CVSS 7.5

When curl retrieves an HTTP response, it stores the incoming headers so that they can be accessed later via the libcurl headers API. However, curl did not have a limit in how many or how large headers it would accept in a response, allowing a malicious server to stream an endless series of headers and eventually cause curl to run out of heap memory.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-09-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • haxx / curl
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 37
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 38
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 39
  • microsoft / windows_10_1809
  • microsoft / windows_10_21h2

Showing 6 representative product identities from 12 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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