When asking to get a file from a file:// URL, libcurl provides a feature that outputs meta-data about the file using HTTP-like headers. The code doing this would send the wrong buffer to the user (stdout or the applications provide callback), which could lead to other private data from the heap to get inadvertently displayed. The wrong buffer was an uninitialized memory area allocated on the heap and if it turned out to not contain any zero byte, it would continue and display the data following that buffer in memory.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Libcurl | Haxx | 7.54.1 (including) | 7.54.1 (including) |
| Curl | Ubuntu | upstream | * |
There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:
Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:
Information exposures can occur in different ways:
It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.