We continue doing curl releases roughly bi-monthly. This time we strike back with a release holding a few interesting new things that I thought are worth highlighting a little extra!

The most important and most depressing news about this release is the two security problems that were fixed. Never before have we released two security advisories for the same release.

Security fixes

The “curl URL sanitization vulnerability” is about how curl trusts user provided URL strings a little too much. Providing sneakily crafted URLs with embeded url-encoded carriage returns and line feeds users could trick curl to do un-intended actions when POP3, SMTP or IMAP protocols were used.

The “curl SSL CBC IV vulnerability” is about how curl inadvertently disables a security measurement in OpenSSL and thus weakens the security for some aspects of SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 connections.

Changes

We have a bunch of new changes added to curl and libcurl that some users might like:

• curl has this ability to run a set of “extra commands” for a couple of protocols when doing a transfer – we call them “quote” operations. A while ago we introduced a way to mark commands within a series of quote commands as not being important if they fail and that the rest of the commands should be sent anyway. We mark such commands with a ‘*’-prefix. Starting now, we support that ‘*’-prefix for SFTP operations as well!
• CURLOPT_DNS_SERVERS is a brand new option that allows programs to set which DNS server(s) libcurl should use to resolve host names. This function only works if libcurl was built to use a resolver backend that allows it to change DNS servers. That currently means nothing else but c-ares.
• Now supports nettle for crypto functions. libcurl has long been supporting both OpenSSL and gcrypt backends for some of the crypto functions libcurl supports. The gcrypt made perfect sense when libcurl was built to use GnuTLS built to use gcrypt, but since GnuTLS recently has changed to using nettle by default the newly added support to use nettle with remove the need for an extra crypto link being linked for some users.
• CURLOPT_INTERFACE was modified to allow “magic prefixes” for the application to tell that it uses an interface and not a host name and vice versa. The previous way would always test for both, which could lead to accidental (and slow) name resolves when the interface name isn’t currently present etc.
• Active FTP sessions with the multi interface are now done much more non-blocking than before. Previously the multi interface would block while waiting for the server to connect back but it no longer does. A new option called CURLOPT_ACCEPTTIMEOUT_MS was added to allow programs to set how long libcurl should wait for accepting the server getting back.
• Coming in from the Debian packaging guys, the configure script how features a new option called –enable-versioned-symbols that does exactly what it is called: it enables versioned symbols in the output libcurl.