libcurl-security(3) Library Functions Manual libcurl-security(3)
NAME
libcurl-security - security considerations when using libcurl
Security
The libcurl project takes security seriously. The library is written
with caution and precautions are taken to mitigate many kinds of risks
encountered while operating with potentially malicious servers on the
Internet. It is a powerful library, however, which allows application
writers to make trade-offs between ease of writing and exposure to po-
tential risky operations. If used the right way, you can use libcurl to
transfer data pretty safely.
Many applications are used in closed networks where users and servers
can (possibly) be trusted, but many others are used on arbitrary servers
and are fed input from potentially untrusted users. Following is a dis-
cussion about some risks in the ways in which applications commonly use
libcurl and potential mitigations of those risks. It is not comprehen-
sive, but shows classes of attacks that robust applications should con-
sider. The Common Weakness Enumeration project at https://cwe.mitre.org/
is a good reference for many of these and similar types of weaknesses of
which application writers should be aware.
Command Lines
If you use a command line tool (such as curl) that uses libcurl, and you
give options to the tool on the command line those options can get read
by other users of your system when they use ps or other tools to list
currently running processes.
To avoid these problems, never feed sensitive things to programs using
command line options. Write them to a protected file and use the -K op-
tion to avoid this.
.netrc
.netrc is a pretty handy file/feature that allows you to login quickly
and automatically to frequently visited sites. The file contains pass-
words in clear text and is a real security risk. In some cases, your
.netrc is also stored in a home directory that is NFS mounted or used on
another network based file system, so the clear text password flies
through your network every time anyone reads that file.
For applications that enable .netrc use, a user who manage to set the
right URL might then be possible to pass on passwords.
To avoid these problems, do not use .netrc files and never store pass-
words in plain text anywhere.
Clear Text Passwords
Many of the protocols libcurl supports send name and password unen-
crypted as clear text (HTTP Basic authentication, FTP, TELNET etc). It
is easy for anyone on your network or a network nearby yours to just
fire up a network analyzer tool and eavesdrop on your passwords. Do not
let the fact that HTTP Basic uses base64 encoded passwords fool you.
They may not look readable at a first glance, but they are easily "deci-
phered" by anyone within seconds.
To avoid this problem, use an authentication mechanism or other protocol
that does not let snoopers see your password: Digest, CRAM-MD5, Ker-
beros, SPNEGO or NTLM authentication. Or even better: use authenticated
protocols that protect the entire connection and everything sent over
it.
Unauthenticated Connections
Protocols that do not have any form of cryptographic authentication can-
not with any certainty know that they communicate with the right remote
server.
If your application is using a fixed scheme or fixed hostname, it is not
safe as long as the connection is unauthenticated. There can be a
man-in-the-middle or in fact the whole server might have been replaced
by an evil actor.
Unauthenticated protocols are unsafe. The data that comes back to curl
may have been injected by an attacker. The data that curl sends might be
modified before it reaches the intended server. If it even reaches the
intended server at all.
Remedies:
Restrict operations to authenticated transfers
Use authenticated protocols protected with HTTPS or SSH.
Make sure the server's certificate etc is verified
Never ever switch off certificate verification.
Redirects
The CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION(3) option automatically follows HTTP redi-
rects sent by a remote server. These redirects can refer to any kind of
URL, not just HTTP. libcurl restricts the protocols allowed to be used
in redirects for security reasons: only HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS are
enabled by default. Applications may opt to restrict that set further.
A redirect to a file: URL would cause the libcurl to read (or write) ar-
bitrary files from the local filesystem. If the application returns the
data back to the user (as would happen in some kinds of CGI scripts), an
attacker could leverage this to read otherwise forbidden data (e.g.
file://localhost/etc/passwd).
If authentication credentials are stored in the ~/.netrc file, or Ker-
beros is in use, any other URL type (not just file:) that requires au-
thentication is also at risk. A redirect such as ftp://some-inter-
nal-server/private-file would then return data even when the server is
password protected.
In the same way, if an unencrypted SSH private key has been configured
for the user running the libcurl application, SCP: or SFTP: URLs could
access password or private-key protected resources, e.g.
sftp://user@some-internal-server/etc/passwd
The CURLOPT_REDIR_PROTOCOLS_STR(3) and CURLOPT_NETRC(3) options can be
used to mitigate against this kind of attack.
A redirect can also specify a location available only on the machine
running libcurl, including servers hidden behind a firewall from the at-
tacker. E.g. http://127.0.0.1/ or http://in-
tranet/delete-stuff.cgi?delete=all or tftp://bootp-server/pc-config-data
Applications can mitigate against this by disabling CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCA-
TION(3) and handling redirects itself, sanitizing URLs as necessary. Al-
ternately, an app could leave CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION(3) enabled but set
CURLOPT_REDIR_PROTOCOLS_STR(3) and install a CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNC-
TION(3) or CURLOPT_PREREQFUNCTION(3) callback function in which ad-
dresses are sanitized before use.
CRLF in Headers
For all options in libcurl which specify headers, including but not lim-
ited to CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER(3), CURLOPT_PROXYHEADER(3), CUR-
LOPT_COOKIE(3), CURLOPT_USERAGENT(3), CURLOPT_REFERER(3) and CUR-
LOPT_RANGE(3), libcurl sends the headers as-is and does not apply any
special sanitation or normalization to them.
If you allow untrusted user input into these options without sanitizing
CRLF sequences in them, someone malicious may be able to modify the re-
quest in a way you did not intend such as injecting new headers.
Local Resources
A user who can control the DNS server of a domain being passed in within
a URL can change the address of the host to a local, private address
which a server-side libcurl-using application could then use. E.g. the
innocuous URL http://fuzzybunnies.example.com/ could actually resolve to
the IP address of a server behind a firewall, such as 127.0.0.1 or
10.1.2.3. Applications can mitigate against this by setting a CUR-
LOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION(3) or CURLOPT_PREREQFUNCTION(3) and checking the
address before a connection.
All the malicious scenarios regarding redirected URLs apply just as well
to non-redirected URLs, if the user is allowed to specify an arbitrary
URL that could point to a private resource. For example, a web app pro-
viding a translation service might happily translate file://local-
host/etc/passwd and display the result. Applications can mitigate
against this with the CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS_STR(3) option as well as by sim-
ilar mitigation techniques for redirections.
A malicious FTP server could in response to the PASV command return an
IP address and port number for a server local to the app running libcurl
but behind a firewall. Applications can mitigate against this by using
the CURLOPT_FTP_SKIP_PASV_IP(3) option or CURLOPT_FTPPORT(3).
Local servers sometimes assume local access comes from friends and
trusted users. An application that expects https://exam-
ple.com/file_to_read that and instead gets
http://192.168.0.1/my_router_config might print a file that would other-
wise be protected by the firewall.
Allowing your application to connect to local hosts, be it the same ma-
chine that runs the application or a machine on the same local network,
might be possible to exploit by an attacker who then perhaps can
"port-scan" the particular hosts - depending on how the application and
servers acts.
IPv4 Addresses
Some users might be tempted to filter access to local resources or simi-
lar based on numerical IPv4 addresses used in URLs. This is a bad and
error-prone idea because of the many different ways a numerical IPv4 ad-
dress can be specified and libcurl accepts: one to four dot-separated
fields using one of or a mix of decimal, octal or hexadecimal encoding.
IPv6 Addresses
libcurl handles IPv6 addresses transparently and just as easily as IPv4
addresses. That means that a sanitizing function that filters out ad-
dresses like 127.0.0.1 is not sufficient - the equivalent IPv6 addresses
::1, ::, 0:00::0:1, ::127.0.0.1 and ::ffff:7f00:1 supplied somehow by an
attacker would all bypass a naive filter and could allow access to unde-
sired local resources. IPv6 also has special address blocks like
link-local and site-local that generally should not be accessed by a
server-side libcurl-using application. A poorly configured firewall in-
stalled in a data center, organization or server may also be configured
to limit IPv4 connections but leave IPv6 connections wide open. In some
cases, setting CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE(3) to CURL_IPRESOLVE_V4 can be used to
limit resolved addresses to IPv4 only and bypass these issues.
Uploads
When uploading, a redirect can cause a local (or remote) file to be
overwritten. Applications must not allow any unsanitized URL to be
passed in for uploads. Also, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION(3) should not be
used on uploads. Instead, the applications should consider handling
redirects itself, sanitizing each URL first.
Authentication
Use of CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH(3) could cause authentication informa-
tion to be sent to an unknown second server. Applications can mitigate
against this by disabling CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION(3) and handling redi-
rects itself, sanitizing where necessary.
Use of the CURLAUTH_ANY option to CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH(3) could result in
username and password being sent in clear text to an HTTP server. In-
stead, use CURLAUTH_ANYSAFE which ensures that the password is encrypted
over the network, or else fail the request.
Use of the CURLUSESSL_TRY option to CURLOPT_USE_SSL(3) could result in
username and password being sent in clear text to an FTP server. In-
stead, use CURLUSESSL_CONTROL to ensure that an encrypted connection is
used or else fail the request.
Cookies
If cookies are enabled and cached, then a user could craft a URL which
performs some malicious action to a site whose authentication is already
stored in a cookie. E.g. http://mail.exam-
ple.com/delete-stuff.cgi?delete=all Applications can mitigate against
this by disabling cookies or clearing them between requests.
Dangerous SCP URLs
SCP URLs can contain raw commands within the scp: URL, which is a side
effect of how the SCP protocol is designed. E.g.
scp://user:pass@host/a;date >/tmp/test;
Applications must not allow unsanitized SCP: URLs to be passed in for
downloads.
file://
By default curl and libcurl support file:// URLs. Such a URL is always
an access, or attempted access, to a local resource. If your application
wants to avoid that, keep control of what URLs to use and/or prevent
curl/libcurl from using the protocol.
By default, libcurl prohibits redirects to file:// URLs.
Warning: file:// on Windows
The Windows operating system tries automatically, and without any way
for applications to disable it, to establish a connection to another
host over the network and access it (over SMB or other protocols), if
only the correct file path is accessed.
When first realizing this, the curl team tried to filter out such at-
tempts in order to protect applications for inadvertent probes of for
example internal networks etc. This resulted in CVE-2019-15601 and the
associated security fix.
However, we have since been made aware of the fact that the previous fix
was far from adequate as there are several other ways to accomplish more
or less the same thing: accessing a remote host over the network instead
of the local file system.
The conclusion we have come to is that this is a weakness or feature in
the Windows operating system itself, that we as an application cannot
safely protect users against. It would just be a whack-a-mole race we do
not want to participate in. There are too many ways to do it and there
is no knob we can use to turn off the practice.
If you use curl or libcurl on Windows (any version), disable the use of
the FILE protocol in curl or be prepared that accesses to a range of
"magic paths" potentially make your system access other hosts on your
network. curl cannot protect you against this.
What if the user can set the URL
Applications may find it tempting to let users set the URL that it can
work on. That is probably fine, but opens up for mischief and trickery
that you as an application author may want to address or take precau-
tions against.
If your curl-using script allow a custom URL do you also, perhaps unin-
tentionally, allow the user to pass other options to the curl command
line if creative use of special characters are applied?
If the user can set the URL, the user can also specify the scheme part
to other protocols that you did not intend for users to use and perhaps
did not consider. curl supports over 20 different URL schemes. "http://"
might be what you thought, "ftp://" or "imap://" might be what the user
gives your application. Also, cross-protocol operations might be done by
using a particular scheme in the URL but point to a server doing a dif-
ferent protocol on a non-standard port.
Remedies:
Use --proto
curl command lines can use --proto to limit what URL schemes it
accepts
Use CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS_STR
libcurl programs can use CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS_STR(3) to limit what
URL schemes it accepts
consider not allowing the user to set the full URL
Maybe just let the user provide data for parts of it? Or maybe
filter input to only allow specific choices?
RFC 3986 vs WHATWG URL
curl supports URLs mostly according to how they are defined in RFC 3986,
and has done so since the beginning.
Web browsers mostly adhere to the WHATWG URL Specification.
This deviance makes some URLs copied between browsers (or returned over
HTTP for redirection) and curl not work the same way. It can also cause
problems if an application parses URLs differently from libcurl and
makes different assumptions about a link. This can mislead users into
getting the wrong thing, connecting to the wrong host or otherwise not
working identically.
Within an application, this can be mitigated by always using the
curl_url(3) API to parse URLs, ensuring that they are parsed the same
way as within libcurl itself.
FTP uses two connections
When performing an FTP transfer, two TCP connections are used: one for
setting up the transfer and one for the actual data.
FTP is not only unauthenticated, but the setting up of the second trans-
fer is also a weak spot. The second connection to use for data, is ei-
ther setup with the PORT/EPRT command that makes the server connect back
to the client on the given IP+PORT, or with PASV/EPSV that makes the
server setup a port to listen to and tells the client to connect to a
given IP+PORT.
Again, unauthenticated means that the connection might be meddled with
by a man-in-the-middle or that there is a malicious server pretending to
be the right one.
A malicious FTP server can respond to PASV commands with the IP+PORT of
a totally different machine. Perhaps even a third party host, and when
there are many clients trying to connect to that third party, it could
create a Distributed Denial-Of-Service attack out of it. If the client
makes an upload operation, it can make the client send the data to an-
other site. If the attacker can affect what data the client uploads, it
can be made to work as a HTTP request and then the client could be made
to issue HTTP requests to third party hosts.
An attacker that manages to control curl's command line options can tell
curl to send an FTP PORT command to ask the server to connect to a third
party host instead of back to curl.
The fact that FTP uses two connections makes it vulnerable in a way that
is hard to avoid.
Active FTP passes on the local IP address
If you use curl/libcurl to do active FTP transfers, curl passes on the
address of your local IP to the remote server - even when for example
using a SOCKS or HTTP proxy in between curl and the target server.
Denial of Service
A malicious server could cause libcurl to effectively hang by sending
data slowly, or even no data at all but just keeping the TCP connection
open. This could effectively result in a denial-of-service attack. The
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT(3) and/or CURLOPT_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT(3) options can be used
to mitigate against this.
A malicious server could cause libcurl to download an infinite amount of
data, potentially causing system resources to be exhausted resulting in
a system or application crash. Setting the CURLOPT_MAXFILESIZE_LARGE(3)
option is not sufficient to guard against this. Instead, applications
should monitor the amount of data received within the write or progress
callback and abort once the limit is reached.
A malicious HTTP server could cause an infinite redirection loop, caus-
ing a denial-of-service. This can be mitigated by using the CUR-
LOPT_MAXREDIRS(3) option.
Arbitrary Headers
User-supplied data must be sanitized when used in options like CUR-
LOPT_USERAGENT(3), CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER(3), CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS(3) and oth-
ers that are used to generate structured data. Characters like embedded
carriage returns or ampersands could allow the user to create additional
headers or fields that could cause malicious transactions.
Server-supplied Names
A server can supply data which the application may, in some cases, use
as a filename. The curl command-line tool does this with --re-
mote-header-name, using the Content-disposition: header to generate a
filename. An application could also use CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL(3) to
generate a filename from a server-supplied redirect URL. Special care
must be taken to sanitize such names to avoid the possibility of a mali-
cious server supplying one like "/etc/passwd", "autoexec.bat", "prn:" or
even ".bashrc".
Server Certificates
A secure application should never use the CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER(3) op-
tion to disable certificate validation. There are numerous attacks that
are enabled by applications that fail to properly validate server
TLS/SSL certificates, thus enabling a malicious server to spoof a legit-
imate one. HTTPS without validated certificates is potentially as inse-
cure as a plain HTTP connection.
Showing What You Do
Relatedly, be aware that in situations when you have problems with
libcurl and ask someone for help, everything you reveal in order to get
best possible help might also impose certain security related risks.
Hostnames, usernames, paths, operating system specifics, etc. (not to
mention passwords of course) may in fact be used by intruders to gain
additional information of a potential target.
Be sure to limit access to application logs if they could hold private
or security-related data. Besides the obvious candidates like usernames
and passwords, things like URLs, cookies or even filenames could also
hold sensitive data.
To avoid this problem, you must of course use your common sense. Often,
you can just edit out the sensitive data or just search/replace your
true information with faked data.
setuid applications using libcurl
libcurl-using applications that set the 'setuid' bit to run with ele-
vated or modified rights also implicitly give that extra power to
libcurl and this should only be done after careful considerations.
Giving setuid powers to the application means that libcurl can save
files using those new rights (if for example the SSLKEYLOGFILE environ-
ment variable is set). Also: if the application wants these powers to
read or manage secrets that the user is otherwise not able to view (like
credentials for a login etc), it should be noted that libcurl still
might understand proxy environment variables that allow the user to
redirect libcurl operations to use a proxy controlled by the user.
File descriptors, fork and NTLM
An application that uses libcurl and invokes fork() gets all file de-
scriptors duplicated in the child process, including the ones libcurl
created.
libcurl itself uses fork() and execl() if told to use the
CURLAUTH_NTLM_WB authentication method which then invokes the helper
command in a child process with file descriptors duplicated. Make sure
that only the trusted and reliable helper program is invoked.
This feature was removed from curl in 8.8.0.
Secrets in memory
When applications pass usernames, passwords or other sensitive data to
libcurl to be used for upcoming transfers, those secrets are kept around
as-is in memory. In many cases they are stored in the heap for as long
as the handle itself for which the options are set.
If an attacker can access the heap, like maybe by reading swap space or
via a core dump file, such data might be accessible.
Further, when eventually closing a handle and the secrets are no longer
needed, libcurl does not explicitly clear memory before freeing it, so
credentials may be left in freed data.
Saving files
libcurl cannot protect against attacks where an attacker has write ac-
cess to the same directory where libcurl is directed to save files.
Cookies
If libcurl is built with PSL (Public Suffix List) support, it detects
and discards cookies that are specified for such suffix domains that
should not be allowed to have cookies.
if libcurl is not built with PSL support, it has no ability to stop su-
per cookies.
Report Security Problems
Should you detect or just suspect a security problem in libcurl or curl,
contact the project curl security team immediately. See
https://curl.se/dev/secprocess.html for details.
SEE ALSO
libcurl-thread(3)
libcurl 2026-07-12 libcurl-security(3)
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