haxx libcurl CVE-2021-22890 vulnerability in Haxx and Other Products
Published on April 1, 2021

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curl 7.63.0 to and including 7.75.0 includes vulnerability that allows a malicious HTTPS proxy to MITM a connection due to bad handling of TLS 1.3 session tickets. When using a HTTPS proxy and TLS 1.3, libcurl can confuse session tickets arriving from the HTTPS proxy but work as if they arrived from the remote server and then wrongly "short-cut" the host handshake. When confusing the tickets, a HTTPS proxy can trick libcurl to use the wrong session ticket resume for the host and thereby circumvent the server TLS certificate check and make a MITM attack to be possible to perform unnoticed. Note that such a malicious HTTPS proxy needs to provide a certificate that curl will accept for the MITMed server for an attack to work - unless curl has been told to ignore the server certificate check.

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Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2021-22890 is exploitable with network access, requires user interaction. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. Public availability of a proof of concept (POC) exploit exists for CVE-2021-22890. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to have no impact on confidentiality, with no impact on integrity, and no impact on availability.

Attack Vector:
NETWORK
Attack Complexity:
LOW
Privileges Required:
NONE
User Interaction:
REQUIRED
Scope:
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact:
NONE
Integrity Impact:
LOW
Availability Impact:
NONE

Weakness Type

What is a Man-in-the-Middle / MITM Vulnerability?

The product does not adequately verify the identity of actors at both ends of a communication channel, or does not adequately ensure the integrity of the channel, in a way that allows the channel to be accessed or influenced by an actor that is not an endpoint. In order to establish secure communication between two parties, it is often important to adequately verify the identity of entities at each end of the communication channel. Inadequate or inconsistent verification may result in insufficient or incorrect identification of either communicating entity. This can have negative consequences such as misplaced trust in the entity at the other end of the channel. An attacker can leverage this by interposing between the communicating entities and masquerading as the original entity. In the absence of sufficient verification of identity, such an attacker can eavesdrop and potentially modify the communication between the original entities.

CVE-2021-22890 has been classified to as a Man-in-the-Middle / MITM vulnerability or weakness.


Products Associated with CVE-2021-22890

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Exploit Probability

EPSS
0.09%
Percentile
25.91%

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.