CURL-CVE-2018-1000120

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    CURL-CVE-2018-1000120

    Published: 14 Mar 2018Last Modified: 27 May 2026

    Summary: FTP path trickery leads to NIL byte out of bounds write

    Details: curl can be fooled into writing a zero byte out of bounds. This bug can trigger when curl is told to work on an FTP URL, with the setting to only issue a single CWD command (`--ftp-method singlecwd` or the libcurl alternative `CURLOPT_FTP_FILEMETHOD`). curl then URL-decodes the given path, calls strlen() on the result and deducts the length of the filename part to find the end of the directory within the buffer. It then writes a zero byte on that index, in a buffer allocated on the heap. If the directory part of the URL contains a "%00" sequence, the directory length might end up shorter than the filename path, making the calculation `size_t index = directory_len - filepart_len` end up with a huge index variable for where the zero byte gets stored: `heap_buffer[index] = 0`. On several architectures that huge index wraps and works as a negative value, thus overwriting memory *before* the intended heap buffer. By using different file part lengths and putting %00 in different places in the URL, an attacker that can control what paths a curl-using application uses can write that zero byte on different indexes.

    References:

    Affected packages

    Package

    Name:

    Purl:

    Affected ranges

    Type: SEMVER

    Events:

    Introduced- 7.12.3
    Fixed -7.59.0

    Affected versions

    7.58.0

    Common Vulnerability Scoring System

    Attack Vector
    Network
    Adjacent
    Local
    Physical
    Privileges Required
    None
    Low
    High
    User Interaction
    None
    Required
    Scope
    Unchanged
    Changed
    Confidentiality
    None
    Low
    High
    Integrity
    None
    Low
    High
    Availability
    None
    Low
    High