Category Archives: cURL and libcurl

curl and/or libcurl related

cURL and libcurl, Development

Why curl closes PRs on GitHub

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Screenshot from a recent pull request merged in the curl project on GitHub

Contributors to the curl project on GitHub tend to notice the above sequence quite quickly: pull requests submitted do not generally appear as “merged” with its accompanying purple blob, instead they are said to be “closed”. This has been happening since 2015 and is probably not going to change anytime soon.

Screenshot showing how GitHub otherwise shows merges

Let me explain why this happens.

I blame GitHub

GitHub’s UI does not allow us to review or comment on commit messages for pull requests. Therefore, it is hard to insist on contributors to provide the correct message, using the proper language in the correct format.

If you make a pull request based on a single commit, the initial PR message is based on the commit message but when follow-up fixes are done and perhaps force-pushed, the PR message is not updated accordingly with the commit message’s updates.

Commit messages with style

I believe having good commit messages following a fixed style and syntax helps the project. It makes the git history better and easier to browse. It allows us to write tools and scripts around git and the git history. Like how we for example generate release notes and project stat graphs based on git log basically.

We also like and use a strictly linear history in curl, meaning that all commits are rebased on the master branch. Lots of the scripting mentioned above depends on this fact.

Manual merges

In order to make sure the commit message is correct, and in fact that the entire commit looks correct, we merge pull requests manually. That means that we pull down the pull request into a local git repository, clean up the commit message to adhere to project standards.

And then we push the commit to git. One or more of the commit messages in such a push then typically contains lines like:

Fixes #[number] and Closes #[number]. Those are instructions to GitHub and we use them like this:

Fixes means that this commit fixed an issue that was reported in the GitHub issue with that id. When we push a commit with that instruction, GitHub closes that issue.

Closes means that we merged a pull request with this id. (GitHub has no way for us to tell it that we merged the pull request.) This instruction makes GitHub closes the corresponding pull request: “[committer] closed this in [commit hash]”.

We do not let GitHub dictate how we do git. We use git and expect GitHub to reflect our git activity.

We COULD but we won’t

We could in theory fix and cleanup the commits locally and manually exactly the way we do now and then force-push them to the remote branch and then use the merge button on the GitHub site and then they would appear as “merged”.

That is however a clunky, annoying and time-consuming extra-step that not only requires that we (always) push code to other people’s branches, it also triggers a whole new round of CI jobs. This, only to get a purple blob instead of a red one. Not worth it.

If GitHub would allow it, I would disable the merge button in the GitHub PR UI for curl since it basically cannot be used correctly in the project.

Squashing all the commits in the PR is also not something we want since in many cases the changes should be kept as more than one commit and they need their own dedicated and correct commit message.

What GitHub could do

GitHub could offer a Merged keyword in the exact same style as Fixed and Closes, that just tells the service that we took care of this PR and merged it as this commit. It’s on me. My responsibility. I merged it. It would help users and contributors to better understand that their closed PR was in fact merged as that commit.

It would also have saved me from having to write this blog post.

Discussion

Hacker news

Addendum

In some post-publish discussions I have seen people ask about credits. This method to merge commits does not break or change how the authors are credited for their work. The commit authors remain the commit authors, and the one doing the commits (which is I when I do them) is stored separately. Like git always do. Doing the pushes manually this way does in no way change this model. GitHub will even count the commits correctly for the committer – assuming they use an email address their GitHub account does (I think).

cURL and libcurl, Network, Web

HTTP/3 in curl mid 2024

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Time for another checkup. Where are we right now with HTTP/3 support in curl for users?

I think curl’s situation is symptomatic for a lot of other HTTP tools and libraries. HTTP/3 has been and continues to be a much tougher deployment journey than HTTP/2 was.

curl supports four alternative HTTP/3 solutions

You can enable HTTP/3 for curl using one of these four different approaches. We provide multiple different ones to let “the market” decide and to allow different solutions to “compete” with each other so that users eventually can get the best one. The one they prefer. That saves us from the hard problem of trying to pick a winner early in the race.

More details about the four different approaches follow below.

Why is curl not using HTTP/3 already?

It already does if you build it yourself with the right set of third party libraries. Also, the curl for windows binaries provided by the curl project supports HTTP/3.

For Linux and other distributions and operating system packagers, a big challenge remains that the most widely used TLS library (OpenSSL) does not offer the widely accepted QUIC API that most other TLS libraries provide. (Remember that HTTP/3 uses QUIC which uses TLS 1.3 internally.) This lack of API prevents existing QUIC libraries to work with OpenSSL as their TLS solution forcing everyone who want to use a QUIC library to use another TLS library – because curl does not easily allows itself to get built using multiple TLS libraries . Having a separate TLS library for QUIC than for other TLS based protocols is not supported.

Debian tries an experiment to enable HTTP/3 in their shipped version of curl by switching to GnuTLS (and building with ngtcp2 + nghttp3).

HTTP/3 backends

To get curl to speak HTTP/3 there are three different components that need to be provided, apart from the adjustments in the curl code itself:

  • TLS 1.3 support for QUIC
  • A QUIC protocol library
  • An HTTP/3 protocol library

Illustrated

Below, you can see the four different HTTP/3 solutions supported by curl in different columns. All except the right-most solution are considered experimental.

HTTP/3 backend support in curl, June 2024

From left to right:

  1. the quiche library does both QUIC and HTTP/3 and it works with BoringSSL for TLS
  2. msh3 is an HTTP/3 library that uses mquic for QUIC and either a fork family or Schannel for TLS
  3. nghttp3 is an HTTP/3 library that in this setup uses OpenSSL‘s QUIC stack, which does both QUIC and TLS
  4. nghttp3 for HTTP/3 using ngtcp2 for QUIC can use a range of different TLS libraries: fork family, GnuTLS and wolfSSL. (picotls is supported too, but curl itself does not support picotls for other TLS use)

ngtcp2 is ahead

ngtcp2 + nghttp3 was the first QUIC and HTTP/3 combination that shipped non-beta versions that work solidly with curl, and that is the primary reason it is the solution we recommend.

The flexibility in TLS solutions in that vertical is also attractive as this allows users a wide range of different libraries to select from. Unfortunately, OpenSSL has decided to not participate in that game so this setup needs another TLS library.

OpenSSL QUIC

OpenSSL 3.2 introduced a QUIC stack implementation that is not “beta”. As the second solution curl can use. In OpenSSL 3.3 they improved it further. Since early 2024 curl can get built and use this library for HTTP/3 as explained above.

However, the API OpenSSL provide for doing transfers is lacking. It lacks vital functionality that makes it inefficient and basically forces curl to sometimes busy-loop to figure out what to do next. This fact, and perhaps additional problems, make the OpenSSL QUIC implementation significantly slower than the competition. Another reason to advise users to maybe use another solution.

We keep communicating with the OpenSSL team about what we think needs to happen and what they need to provide in their API so that we can do QUIC efficiently. We hope they will improve their API going forward.

Stefan Eissing produced nice comparisons graph that I have borrowed from his Performance presentation (from curl up 2024. Stefan also blogged about h3 performance in curl earlier.). It compares three HTTP/3 curl backends against each other. (It does not include msh3 because it does not work good enough in curl.)

As you can see below, in several test setups OpenSSL is only achieving roughly half the performance of the other backends in both requests per second and raw transfer speed. This is on a localhost, so basically CPU bound transfers.

HTTP/3 backend performance in curl compared, requests/second
HTTP/3 backend performance in curl compared, megabytes/second

I believe OpenSSL needs to work on their QUIC performance in addition to providing an improved API.

quiche and msh3

quiche is still labeled beta and is only using BoringSSL which makes it harder to use in a lot of situations.

msh3 does not work at all right now in curl after a refactor a while ago.

HTTP/3 is a CPU hog

This is not news to anyone following protocol development. I have been repeating this over and over in every HTTP/3 presentation I have done – and I have done a few by now, but I think it is worth repeating and I also think Stefan’s graphs for this show the situation in a crystal clear way.

HTTP/3 is slow in terms of transfer performance when you are CPU bound. In most cases of course, users are not CPU bound because typically networks are the bottlenecks and instead the limited bandwidth to the remote site is what limits the speed on a particular transfer.

HTTP/3 is typically faster to completing a handshake, thanks to QUIC, so a HTTP/3 transfer can often get the first byte transmitted sooner than any other HTTP version (over TLS) can.

To show how this looks with more of Stefan’s pictures, let’s first show the faster handshakes from his machine somewhere in Germany. These tests were using a curl 8.8.0-DEV build, from a while before curl 8.8.0 was released.

HTTP/3 vs HTTP/1.1 handshake performance in curl compared

Nope, we cannot explain why google.com actually turned out worse with HTTP/3. It can be added that curl.se is hosted by Fastly’s CDN, so this is really comparing curl against three different CDN vendors’ implementations.

HTTP/3 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/1.1 throughput performance in curl compared

Again: these are CPU bound transfers so what this image really shows is the enormous amounts of extra CPU work that is required to push these transfers through. As long as you are not CPU bound, your transfers should of course run at the same speeds as they do with the older HTTP versions.

These comparisons show curl’s treatment of these protocols as they are not generic protocol comparisons (if such are even possible). We cannot rule out that curl might have some issues or weird solutions in the code that could explain part of this. I personally suspect that while we certainly always have areas for improvement remaining, I don’t think we have any significant performance blockers lurking. We cannot be sure though.

OpenSSL-QUIC stands out here as well, in the not so attractive end.

HTTP/3 deployments

w3techs, Mozilla and Cloudflare data all agree that somewhere around 28-30% of the web traffic is HTTP/3 right now. This is a higher rate than HTTP/1.1 for browser traffic.

An interesting detail about this 30% traffic share is that all the big players and CDNs (Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, Amazon etc) run HTTP/3, and I would guess that they combined normally have a much higher share of all the web traffic than 30%. Meaning that there is a significant amount of browser web traffic that could use HTTP/3 but still does not. Unfortunately I don’t have the means to figure out explanations for this.

HTTPS stack overview

In case you need a reminder, here is how an HTTPS stack works.

cURL and libcurl

My BDFL guiding principles

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The thing about me being a BDFL for curl is that it has the D in there. I have the means and ability to push for or veto just about anything I like or don’t like in the project, should I decide to. In my public presentations about curl I emphasize that I truly try to be a benevolent dictator, but then I also presume quite a few dictators would say and believe so whether that is true or not to the outside world.

I think we can say with some certainty that dictatorships are not the ideal way of running a country, and it might also go for Open Source projects.

In curl we remain using this model because it works and changing it to something else is a large and complicated process which we have not wanted to get to because we have not had any strong reason. There is anecdotal evidence that this way of running the project works somewhat.

A significant difference between being a dictator for an Open Source project compared to a country is however the ease with which every citizen could just leave one day and start a new clone country, with all the same citizens and the same layout, just without the dictator. I’m easily replaceable and made into past tense if I would abuse my role.

So there is this inherent force to push me to do good for the project even if I am a “dictator”.

As a BDFL of curl…

This is what I think the curl project should focus on. What I want the curl project to be. These are the ten commandments I think should remain our guiding principles. I think this is what makes curl. My benevolent guidelines.

My ten guiding principles for curl

  1. Be open and friendly
  2. Ship rock-solid products
  3. Be a leader in Open Source
  4. Maintain a security first focus
  5. Provide top-notch documentation
  6. Remain independent
  7. Respond timely
  8. Keep up with the world
  9. Stay on the bleeding edge
  10. Respect feedback

This list of ten areas are perhaps things every open source projects want to focus and excel in, but I think that is irrelevant here. These are then ten key and core focus points for me when I work on curl. We should be best-in-class in each and every one of them.

Let me elaborate

1. Be open and friendly to all contributors, new and old

I think open source projects have a lot to gain by making efforts in being friendly and approachable. We were all newcomers into a project once. We gain more contributors, better, by remaining a friendly and open project.

This does not mean that we should tolerate abuse or trolling.

I try to lead this by example. I do not always succeed.

2. Ship rock-solid products for the universe to depend upon

Reviews, tests, analyzers, fuzzers, audits, bug bounty programs etc are means to make sure the code runs smoothly everywhere. Studying protocol specs and inter-operating with servers and other clients on the Internet ensure that the products we make work as expect by billions of end users. On this planet and beyond. If our products cannot carry the world on their shoulders, we fail.

Rock-solid also means we are reliable over time – we do not break users’ scripts and applications. We maintain ABI/API compatibility. The command line options the curl tool introduces are supported until the end of time.

3. Be a leader in Open Source, follow every best practice

As true believers in the powers of Open Source we lead by example. We are here to show that you not only can do all development and everything in the open and using open source practices, but that it it also makes the project thrive and deliver state of the art outcomes.

4. Always keep users secure, maintain a security first focus

Provide features and functionality with user and protocol security in focus. Address security concerns and reports without delays. Document every past mistake in thorough detail. Help users do secure and safe Internet transfers – by default.

5. Provide industry-leading quality documentation

A key to successful usage of our products, to give users the means and ability to use our project fully, we need to document how it works and how to use it. Everything needs to be documented with clarity and detail enough so that users understand and are empowered.

No comparable software project, open or proprietary, can compete with the quality and amount of documentation we provide.

6. Roam free, independent from all companies and organizations

curl shall forever remain independent. curl is not part of any umbrella organization, it is not owned or controlled by any company. It makes us entirely independent and free to do what we think is best for the community, for our users and for Internet transfers in general. Its license shall remain set and it ensures that curl remains free. Copyright holders are individuals, there is no assignment or licensing of copyrights involved.

7. Respond timely on issues and questions

We shall strive to respond to issues, reports and questions sent to the project within a reasonable time. To show that we care and to help users solve their problems. We want users to solve their problems sooner rather than later.

It does not mean that we always can fix the problems or give a good answer immediately. Sometimes we just have to say that we can’t fix it for now.

8. Remain the internet transfer choice, keep up with the world

In the curl project we should keep up with protocol development, updates and changes. The way we do Internet transfers changes over time and curl needs to keep up to remain relevant.

We also need to write our protocol implementations sensibly, knowing that we are being watched and our way of doing things are often copied, referred to and relied upon by other Internet clients.

This also implies that we are never done and that we can always improve. In every aspect of the project.

9. Offer bleeding edge protocol support to aid early adopters

When new protocols or ways to do protocols are introduced to the world, curl can play a great role in providing and offering early support of such protocols. This has through the years helped countless of other implementers or even protocol authors of these protocols and with this, we help improving the world around us. It also helps us get early feedback on our implementation and thus ship better code earlier.

10. Listen to and respect community feedback

I might be a dictator, but this dictatorship would not work if I and the rest of the curl maintainers did not listen to what the users and the greater curl community have to say. We need to stay agile and have a sense of what people want our products to do and to not do. Now and in the future.

An open source project can always get forked the second it makes a bad turn and somehow gives up on, sells out or betrays its users. Me being a dictator does not protect us from that. We need to stay responsive, listening and caring. We are here for our users.

Flag?

If curl was an evil empire, I figure we would sport this flag:

cURL and libcurl

Google Peer Bonus number five

It is not quite a gold medal, but it is now the fifth time I have the honor of receiving a Google Open Source Peer Bonus. I might soon start to think I have some fans over there.

There is a monetary component to this bonus. Last time it was to the amount of 500 USD. I have not seen the amount for this time as it has not been transferred to me yet. I trust it will buy me a few good beers anyway.

Update June 10: it was 500 USD this time as well.

cURL and libcurl

How to verify a curl release

A while ago I wrote about how curl is verified in several ways in order to reduce the risk for unwanted or even malicious content to appear in release tarballs. Now we look deeper at exactly what needs to be done to verify a curl release – how you and everyone else can do it.

Don’t trust, verify!

This functionality is shipped starting with curl 8.8.0. Previous versions were much harder to reproduce because we did not provide the necessary information and tooling in this convenient and easily accessible way.

Prerequisites

This verification procedure verifies that whatever is in git ends up in the release tarball unaltered. Nothing more, nothing less. To make sure that what exists in git is fine, people need to review that content but that is not covered in this blog post.

(As a little side-point: we work hard to not have any binary blobs or other files in the git repository that could magically get converted into exploit code using the right key.)

Tarball releases

A release from the curl project is always a tarball. The tarball is provided using several (four over the recent years) different compression methods. Each tarball has the identical content but is compressed differently. Therefore each separate tarball is also separately signed.

The tarball is generated from git from a release tag. curl’s release tags are named like curl-3_4_5 for version 3.4.5. With underscores instead of dots for historic reasons.

The release making script is carefully written to make sure it makes the release tarballs the exact same way to make the exact same output when run multiple times.

Reproducing means making an identical copy

When someone can reproduce a curl release, it means creating a new set of tarballs that are binary identical copies of the ones from a previous curl release. That process requires a set of known tools and knowing the exact timestamp.

Tools for release

The tarball features a few files that don’t exist in git because they are generated at release time. To reproduce those files, you likely need more or less the exact version of the involved tools that the person who makes the release (me) had at the time the tarball was created.

To help with this, there is a markdown document called docs/RELEASE-TOOLS.md generated and shipped in recent tarballs. It contains a list of the exact versions of a few key tools that were used. The list might look something like this:

- autoconf: 2.71-3
- automake: 1:1.16.5-1.3
- libtool: 2.4.7-5
- make: 4.3-4.1
- perl: 5.36.0-7+deb12u1
- git: 1:2.39.2-1.1

Time of release

The release tools document also contains another key component: the exact time stamp at which the release was done – using integer second resolution. In order to generate a correct tarball clone, you need to also generate the new version using the old version’s timestamp. Because the modification date of all files in the produced tarball will be set to this timestamp.

Setting the old release’s time is done by setting the environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to the timestamp mentioned in RELEASE-TOOLS.md before creating the tarball.

To reproduce a release tarball, you need to extract that SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and use it when creating a clone.

With docker

We have created a Dockerfile for the specific purpose of making releases. Using it is easy. You make a curl 8.8.0 release clone like this.

$ git clone https://github.com/curl/curl
$ cd curl
$ git checkout curl-8_8_0
$ ./scripts/dmaketgz 8.8.0 $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH

The second argument to dmaketgz is the epoch time from the release tarball. It makes the newly generated tarball use the same timestamp as the previous one.

When dmaketgz is done, you are left with four tarballs in the curl source code tree, each named like curl-8.8.0.* with four different extensions for the different compression and archiving methods. They are bit for bit identical copies of the official curl 8.8.0 release tarballs.

If you sha256sum the new files and the official release tarballs, you see that they create identical checksums. Of course!

Without docker

Making a proper clone is harder without docker. This, because we use a Debian Linux to build releases and we use a set of tools and their exact versions as shipped by Debian. You might get slightly different outputs if you do not use the exact versions this Debian version ships. Getting a single line difference by a single tool will generate a different tarball and thus fail the reproducibility test.

This is why we provide the Dockerfile as mentioned above. Without that, you probably will have a higher success rate if you try the below steps running on a Debian Linux machine.

If you have the necessary tools installed using the versions mentioned in docs/RELEASE-TOOLS.md, do this to make a release copy. Below, we pretend 1715301052 is the timestamp from the real release.

$ git clone https://github.com/curl/curl
$ cd curl
$ git checkout curl-8_8_0
$ export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=1715301052
$ ./maketgz 8.8.0

Signatures

Every single published release tarball is signed, and a reproduced tarball can in fact be verified using the release signature since they are binary clones.

No transparency logs

Several people have asked me for transparency logs for the signing of the tarballs, to reduce the risk even further that in case of a breach of my development environment, someone else could be able to produce a curl release and sign it.

While in general an idea I like, I have not taken any steps towards it at this point. And to do a fake curl release, you need more than just being able to generate my signature. You also need the magic to make the release appear on the curl website in the correct way, so there are in fact multiple steps with separate keys, passwords and authentication methods in place which should make it a tough challenge to any bad guy.

I am not saying it is perfect nor that there is no room for improvement: because of course this process can always get improved. I am sure we will have reasons to polish it further going forward.

cURL and libcurl

curl 8.8.0

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Numbers

the 257th release
8 changes
56 days (total: 9,560)
220 bug-fixes (total: 10,271)
348 commits (total: 32,280)
1 new public libcurl function (total: 94)
1 new curl_easy_setopt() option (total: 305)
1 new curl command line option (total: 259)
84 contributors, 41 new (total: 3,173)
49 authors, 20 new (total: 1,272)
0 security fixes (total: 155)

Download the new curl release from curl.se as always.

Release presentation

Security

It feels good to be able to say that this time around we do not have a single security vulnerability to announce and we in fact do not have any in the queue either.

Changes

Bugfixes

Some of the bugfixes from this cycle that might be worth noticing:

dist and build

  • reproducible tarballs. I will do a separate post with details later, but now it is easy for anyone who wants to, to generate an identical copy to verify what we ship.
  • docs/RELEASE-TOOLS.md into the tarball. This documents the tools and versions used to generate the files included in the tarball that are not present in git.
  • drop MSVC project files for recent versions. If you need to generate them for more recent versions, cmake can do it for you.
  • configure fix HAVE_IOCTLSOCKET_FIONBIO test for gcc 14. It runs more picky by default so it would always fail the check.
  • add -q as first option when invoking curl for tests. To reduce the risk of people having a ~/.curlrc file that ruins things.
  • fix make install with configure –disable-docs

tool

  • make –help adapt to the terminal width. Makes it easier on the eye when the terminal is wider.
  • limit rate unpause for -T . uploads. Avoids busy-looping
  • curl output warning for leading unicode quote character. Because it seems like a fairly common mistake when people copy and paste command lines from random sources
  • don’t truncate the etag save file by default. A regression less.

TLS

  • bearssl: use common code for cipher suite lookup
  • mbedtls: call mbedtls_ssl_setup() after RNG callback is set. Otherwise, more recent versions of mbedTLS will just return error.
  • mbedtls: support TLS 1.3. If you use a new enough version.
  • openssl: do not set SSL_MODE_RELEASE_BUFFERS. Uses slightly more memory, but uses fewer memory allocation calls.
  • wolfssl: plug memory leak in wolfssl_connect_step2()

bindings

  • openldap: create ldap URLs correctly for IPv6 addresses, doing LDAP with IPv6 numerical IP addresses in the URL just did not work previously.
  • quiche: expire all active transfers on connection close
  • quiche: trust its timeout handling

libcurl

  • fix curl_global_cleanup crash in Windows. A regression coming from the introduction of the async name resolver function.
  • brotli and others, pass through 0-length writes
  • ignore duplicate chunked encoding. Apparently some sites do this and browsers let them so we need to let it slide…
  • CURLINFO_REQUEST_SIZE: fixed
  • ftp: add tracing support. Gives us better tooling to track down FTP problems.
  • http2: emit RST when client write fails. Previously it would just silently leave the stream there…
  • http: reject HTTP major version switch mid connection. This should of course never happen, but if it does, curl will error out correctly.
  • multi: introduce SETUP state for better timeouts. This adds a proper separation for when the existing transfer is retried or when the state machine is restarted because it make as a new transfer.
  • multi: timeout handles even without connection. They would previously often be exempted from checks and would linger for too long until stopped.
  • fix handling of paused upload on completed download
  • do not URL decode proxy credentials
  • allow setting port number zero. Remember this old post?
  • fix relative redirects to fragment-only
  • fix memory leak in websocket error path
cURL and libcurl, Security

curl, Tor, dot onion and SOCKS

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You can of course use curl to access hosts through Tor. (I know you know Tor so I am not going to explain it here.)

SOCKS

The typical way to access Tor is via a SOCKS5 proxy and curl has supported that since some time during 2002. Like this:

curl --socks5-hostname localhost:5432 https://example.com

or

curl --proxy socks5h://localhost:5432 https://example.com

or

export HTTPS_PROXY=socks5h://localhost:5432
curl https://example.com

Name resolving with SOCKS5

You know Tor, but do you know SOCKS5? It is an old and simple protocol for setting up a connection and when using it, the client can decide to either pass on the full hostname it wants to connect to, or it can pass on the exact IP address.

(SOCKS5 is by the way a minor improvement of the SOCKS4 protocol, which did not support IPv6.)

When you use curl, you decide if you want curl or the proxy to resolve the target hostname. If you connect to a site on the public Internet it might not even matter who is resolving it as either party would in theory get the same set of IP addresses.

The .onion TLD

There is a concept of “hidden” sites within the Tor network. They are not accessible on the public Internet. They have names in the .onion top-level domain. For example. the search engine DuckDuckGo is available at https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/.

.onion names are used to provide access to end to end encrypted, secure, anonymized services; that is, the identity and location of the server is obscured from the client. The location of the client is obscured from the server.

To access a .onion host, you must let Tor resolve it because a normal DNS server aware of the public Internet knows nothing about it.

This is why we recommend you ask the SOCKS5 proxy to resolve the hostname when accessing Tor with curl.

The proxy connection

The SOCKS5 protocol is clear text so you must make sure you do not access the proxy over a network as then it will leak the hostname to eavesdroppers. That is why you see the examples above use localhost for the proxy.

You can also step it up and connect to the SOCKS5 proxy over unix domain sockets with recent curl versions like this:

curl --proxy socks5h://localhost/run/tor/socks https://example.com

.onion leakage

Sites using the .onion TLD are not on the public Internet and it is pointless to ask your regular DNS server to resolve them. Even worse: if you in fact ask your normal resolver you practically advertise your intention of connection to a .onion site and you give the full name of that site to the outsider. A potentially significant privacy leak.

To combat the leakage problem, RFC 7686 The “.onion” Special-Use Domain Name was published in October 2015. With the involvement and consent from people involved in the Tor project.

It only took a few months after 7686 was published until there was an accurate issue filed against curl for leaking .onion names. Back then, in the spring of 2016, no one took upon themselves to fix this and it was instead simply added to the queue of known bugs.

This RFC details (among other things) how libraries should refuse to resolve .onion host names using the regular means in order to avoid the privacy leak.

After having stewed in the known bugs lists for almost five years, it was again picked up in 2023, a pull-request was authored, and when curl 8.1.0 shipped on May 17 2023 curl refused to resolve .onion hostnames.

Tor still works remember?

Since users are expected to connect using SOCKS5 and handing over the hostname to the proxy, the above mention refusal to resolve a .onion address did not break the normal Tor use cases with curl.

Turns out there are other common ways to do it.

A few days before the 8.1.0 release shipped a discussion thread was created: I want to resolve onion addresses.

Every change breaks someone’s workflow

XKCD 1172 – we hear you

Transparent proxies

Turns out there is a group of people who runs transparent proxies who automatically “catches” all local traffic and redirects it over Tor. They have a local DNS server who can resolve .onion host names and they intercept outgoing traffic to instead tunnel it through Tor.

With this setup now curl no longer works because it will not send .onion addresses to the local resolver because RFC 7686 tells us we should not,

curl of course does not know when it runs in a presumed safe and deliberate transparent proxy network or when it does not. When a leak is not a leak or when it actually is a leak.

torsocks

A separate way to access tor is to use the torsocks tool. Torsocks allows you to use most applications in a safe way with Tor. It ensures that DNS requests are handled safely and explicitly rejects any traffic other than TCP from the application you’re using.

You run it like 

torsocks curl https://example.com

Because of curl’s new .onion filtering, the above command line works fine for “normal” hostnames but no longer for .onion hostnames.

Arguably, this is less of a problem because when you use curl you typically don’t need to use torsocks since curl has full SOCKS support natively.

Option to disable the filter?

In the heated discussion thread we are told repeatedly how silly we are who block .onion name resolves – exactly in the way the RFC says, the RFC that had the backing and support from the Tor project itself. There are repeated cries for us to add ways to disable the filter.

I am of course sympathetic with the users whose use cases now broke.

A few different ways to address this have been proposed, but the problem is difficult: how would curl or a user know that it is fine to leak a name or not? Adding a command line option to say it is okay to leak would just mean that some scripts would use that option and users would run it in the wrong conditions and your evil malicious neighbors who “help out” will just add that option when they convince their victims to run an innocent looking curl command line.

The fact that several of the louder voices show abusive tendencies in the discussion of course makes these waters even more challenging to maneuver.

Future

I do not yet know how or where this lands. The filter has now been in effect in curl for a year. Nothing is forever, we keep improving. We listen to feedback and we are of course eager to make sure curl remains and awesome tool and library also for content over Tor.

This discussion is also held within the more proper realms of the tor project itself.

Credits

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

cURL and libcurl

curl user survey 2024

3 Comments

Welcome to the 11th annual curl user survey. This is a once a year poll that we ask as many curl and libcurl users as possible to respond to.

>> Take the survey <<

This is in many ways the only real way we get to know what curl users think about all sorts of curl matters. Our website does not log, it has no adds, it uses no cookies and it does no tracking. We do not count downloads, we do not know which man pages are read the most. We mostly ship our code into the void without knowing a whole about what people do with and think about it.

Asking our users directly is in effect our only and best way to get proper answers. So we do this every year, and we ask a lot of questions in the same fashion as last year so that we can better detect trends and changes in the community.

Your help is not only appreciated, it is crucial. Tell us your honest opinion. And if you have friends you know use curl or libcurl, please ask them to submit a set of answers as well. You help us greatly by donating several minutes of your busy life.

>> Take the survey <<

The survey will be up during 14 days from May 14th until the end of May 28th 2024. It would be awesome to try to beat the last year’s submission numbers when 606 persons responded.

See also: the curl user survey 2023 analysis, which details the results and thoughts after last year’s edition.

cURL and libcurl

I survived curl up 2024

6 Comments

On Friday May 3, 2024 I had several of my curl friends over for dinner in my house. An unusually warm and sunny spring day with a temperature reaching twenty degrees centigrade.

The curl up 2024 weekend started excellently and the following morning we all squeezed ourselves into a conference room in downtown Stockholm. I had rented a room in a hotel in the city center for two days.

curl up is never a big meeting/conference but we have in the past sometimes been around twenty-five attendees. This year’s amount of fifteen was the smallest so far, but in this small set of people we have a set of long-term well-known curl contributors. It is not a big list of attendees that creates a good curl up.

Swag

We started by making sure every attendee got their needs of curl t-shirts, curl mugs, curl stickers and curl coasters satisfied. The t-shirts of the year are “forest green” with the curl logo in white on the front and the curl symbol slightly larger on the back.

I have spare t-shirts that I intend to distribute to people I meet over the coming year. Before you ask: no, there is no way to buy these.

Recordings

I had tested my external microphone setup at home but it just refused to work when at the venue. We struggled for a while until we had to surrender and fall back to using the built-in microphone in the webcam that we used for recording the video. This is why the sound is low in all recordings we did. A little disappointing. Sorry for this.

I live-streamed the entire event over twitch. We had in total over 460 unique viewers over the days and at times at least we had over 30 concurrent sustained viewers. This made us at least sometimes have twice the size audience online as in the room. In spite of the sound issue.

I also noticed that my trusty old laptop was maybe a little weak for this purpose as it struggled to stream and save the recordings at high frame rates.

I brought: two laptops, webcam on stand, mike, mike-stand, power for laptops, cable kit, repair kit, 12 curl mugs, eight packs with different curl stickers, carton coasters, pcb coasters, t-shirts, name tags + pens, two UCB-C to HDMI adapters.

Day one

The state of curl 2024

Where are we, what did we do last year or so? Who did the work? How often? How much?

Evolutions

Apparently this is not a real word, but Stefan Eissing pushes for language development in this presentation where he talks about changes and improvements he worked on in curl over the last few years.

Fuzzing curl

James Fuller talks about his work on generating “fun” curl command lines in order to find those that might not be handled correctly.

Implementing parallel testing

Dan Fandrich talks about the journey from serial to fully parallel tests in curl.

curl containers

James is back and talks about where the curl containers are right now.

Security

I talk about the security situation in curl as of right now and the last year.

End of day 1

We topped off this packed day with a twenty minute walk through a sunny Stockholm down to the water where we could sit outside and have a few drinks before we moved over to the restaurant where we ended the evening with a joint dinner. A great first day!

Day two

The nice weather was gone. The temperature dropped ten degrees and the rain poured down most of this day.

HTTP/1/2/3 Performance

Stefan Eissing warms up the day. About his work on HTTP refactors and related performance improvements.

trurl

This is the newcomer in the curl family and I talked a little about what it is and why it exists.

Apple Specialties

Christian has improved curl on Apple devices, which he talks about.

rust in curl

You can build curl to use third party components written in rust. This is where we are now and what might happen next. Or not.

Test clutch

Dan talks about his work on improving curl tests and their reliability.

Future

We don’t know much about the future but there are some plans and there are at least some ideas…

End of curl up 2024

The rest of day two was mostly spent hanging out and talking about life, the universe and various things curl. People started leaving and by five o’clock we shut the door for the last time this time around. We had survived curl up 2024.

After all these talks, discussions, dinners, beers, coffees, challenging questions, brainstorms over 48 hours, I was exhausted and drained of energy. Apart from the recording problem, I think almost everything else in the event organization went as smoothly as we could have wished for. The venue, the food, the coffee etc worked perfectly for us.

Planning ahead for 2025

We will most certainly run another curl up event in 2025 in roughly the same frame of the year as we did now. The idea is then to visit another capital city in Europe. Stay tuned for coming announcements of date and location for that.