curl is an internet transfer engine. A rather modular one too. Parts of curl’s functionality is provided by selectable alternative implementations that we call backends. You select what backends to enable at build-time and in many cases the backends are enabled and powered by different 3rd party libraries.
Many backends
curl has a range of such alternative backends for various features:
International Domain Names
Name resolving
TLS
SSH
HTTP/3
HTTP content encoding
HTTP
Stable API and ABI
Maintaining a stable API and ABI is key to libcurl. As long as those promises are kept, changing internals such as switching between backends is perfectly fine.
The API is the armored front door that we don’t change. The backends is the garden on the back of the house that we can dig up and replant every year if we want, without us having to change the front door.
TLS backends
Already back in 2005 we added support for using an alternative TLS library in curl when we added support for GnuTLS in addition to OpenSSL, and since then we’ve added many more. We do this by having an internal API through which we do all the TLS related things and for each third party library we support we have code that does the necessary logic to connect the internal API with the corresponding TLS library.
rustls
Today, we merged support for yet another TLS library: rustls. This is a TLS library written in rust and it has a C API provided in a separate project called crustls. Strictly speaking, curl is built to use crustls.
This is still early days for the rustls backend and it is not yet feature complete. There’s more work to do and polish to apply before we can think of it as a proper competitor to the already established and well-used TLS backends, but with this merge it makes it much easier for more people to help out and test it out. Feel free and encouraged to join in!
We count this addition as the 14th concurrently supported TLS library in curl. I’m not aware of any other project, anywhere, that supports more or even this many TLS libraries.
rustls again!
The TLS library named mesalink is actually already using rustls, but under an OpenSSL API disguise and we support that since a few years back…
Credits
The TLS backend code for rustls was written and contributed by Jacob Hoffman-Andrews.
On February 11th, 2021 18:00 UTC (10am Pacific time, 19:00 Central Europe) we invite you to participate in a webinar we call “curl, Hyper and Rust”. To join us at the live event, please register via the link below:
https://www.wolfssl.com/isrg-partner-webinar/
What is the project about, how will this improve curl and Hyper, how was it done, what lessons can be learned, what more can we expect in the future and how can newcomers join in and help?
Participating speakers in this webinar are:
Daniel Stenberg. Founder of and lead developer of curl.
Josh Aas, Executive Director at ISRG / Let’s Encrypt.
The event went on for 60 minutes, including the Q&A session at the end.
Recording
Questions?
If you already have a question you want to ask, please let us know ahead of time. Either in a reply here on the blog, or as a reply on one of the many tweets that you will see about about this event from me and my fellow “webinarees”.
You might recall that my Twitter account was hijacked and then again just two weeks later.
The first: brute-force
The first take-over was most likely a case of brute-forcing my weak password while not having 2FA enabled. I have no excuse for either of those lapses. I had convinced myself I had 2fa enabled which made me take a (too) lax attitude to my short 8-character password that was possible to remember. Clearly, 2fa was not enabled and then the only remaining wall against the evil world was that weak password.
The second time
After that first hijack, I immediately changed password to a strong many-character one and I made really sure I enabled 2fa with an authenticator app and I felt safe again. Yet it would only take seventeen days until I again was locked out from my account. This second time, I could see how someone had managed to change the email address associated with my account (displayed when I wanted to reset my password). With the password not working and the account not having the correct email address anymore, I could not reset the password, and my 2fa status had no effect. I was locked out. Again.
It felt related to the first case because I’ve had my Twitter account since May 2008. I had never lost it before and then suddenly after 12+ years, within a period of three weeks, it happens twice?
Why and how
How this happened was a complete mystery to me. The account was restored fairly swiftly but I learned nothing from that.
Then someone at Twitter contacted me. After they investigated what had happened and how, I had a chat with a responsible person there and he explained for me exactly how this went down.
Had Twitter been hacked? Is there a way to circumvent 2FA? Were my local computer or phone compromised? No, no and no.
Apparently, an agent at Twitter who were going through the backlog of issues, where my previous hijack issue was still present, accidentally changed the email on my account by mistake, probably confusing it with another account in another browser tab.
There was no outside intruder, it was just a user error.
Okay, the cynics will say, this is what he told me and there is no evidence to back it up. That’s right, I’m taking his words as truth here but I also think the description matches my observations. There’s just no way for me or any outsider to verify or fact-check this.
A brighter future
They seem to already have identified things to improve to reduce the risk of this happening again and Michael also mentioned a few other items on their agenda that should make hijacks harder to do and help them detect suspicious behavior earlier and faster going forward. I was also happy to provide my feedback on how I think they could’ve made my lost-account experience a little better.
I’m relieved that the second time at least wasn’t my fault and neither of my systems are breached or hacked (as far as I know).
I’ve also now properly and thoroughly gone over all my accounts on practically all online services I use and made really sure that I have 2fa enabled on them. On some of them I’ve also changed my registered email address to one with 30 random letters to make it truly impossible for any outsider to guess what I use.
(I’m also positively surprised by this extra level of customer care Twitter showed for me and my case.)
Am I a target?
I don’t think I am. I think maybe my Twitter account could be interesting to scammers since I have almost 25K followers and I have a verified account. Me personally, I work primarily with open source and most of my works is already made public. I don’t deal in business secrets. I don’t think my personal stuff attracts attackers more than anyone else does.
What about the risk or the temptation for bad guys in trying to backdoor curl? It is after all installed in some 10 billion systems world-wide. I’ve elaborated on that before. Summary: I think it is terribly hard for someone to actually manage to do it. Not because of the security of my personal systems perhaps, but because of the entire setup and all processes, signings, reviews, testing and scanning that are involved.
So no. I don’t think my personal systems are a valued singled out target to attackers.
Status: 00:27 in the morning of December 4 my account was restored again. No words or explanations on how it happened – yet.
This morning (December 3rd, 2020) I woke up to find myself logged out from my Twitter account on the devices where I was previously logged in. Due to “suspicious activity” on my account. I don’t know the exact time this happened. I checked my phone at around 07:30 and then it has obviously already happened. So at time time over night.
Trying to log back in, I get prompted saying I need to update my password first. Trying that, it wants to send a confirmation email to an email address that isn’t mine! Someone has managed to modify the email address associated with my account.
It has only been two weeks since someone hijacked my account the last time and abused it for scams. When I got the account back, I made very sure I both set a good, long, password and activated 2FA on my account. 2FA with auth-app, not SMS.
The last time I wasn’t really sure about how good my account security was. This time I know I did it by the book. And yet this is what happened.
Excuse the Swedish version, but it wasn’t my choice. Still, it shows the option to send the email confirmation to an email address that isn’t mine and I didn’t set it there.
Communication
I was in touch with someone at Twitter security and provided lots of details of my systems , software, IP address etc while they researched their end about what happened. I was totally transparent and gave them all info I had that could shed some light.
I was contacted by a Sr. Director from Twitter (late Dec 4 my time). We have a communication established and I’ve been promised more details and information at some point next week. Stay tuned.
Was I breached?
Many people have proposed that the attacker must have come through my local machine to pull this off. If someone did, it has been a very polished job as there is no trace at all of that left anywhere on my machine. Also, to reset my password I would imagine the attacker would need to somehow hijack my twitter session, need the 2FA or trigger a password reset and intercept the email. I don’t receive emails on my machine so the attacker would then have had to (also?) manage to get into my email machine and removed that email – and not too many others because I receive a lot of email and I’ve kept on receiving a lot of email during this period.
I’m not ruling it out. I’m just thinking it seems unlikely.
If the attacker would’ve breached my phone and installed something nefarious on that, it would not have removed any reset emails and it seems like a pretty touch challenge to hijack a “live” session from the Twitter client or get the 2FA code from the authenticator app. Not unthinkable either, just unlikely.
Most likely?
As I have no insights into the other end I cannot really say which way I think is the most likely that the perpetrator used for this attack, but I will maintain that I have no traces of a local attack or breach and I know of no malicious browser add-ons or twitter apps on my devices.
Details
Firefox version 83.0 on Debian Linux with Tweetdeck in a tab – a long-lived session started over a week ago (ie no recent 2FA codes used),
Browser extensions: Cisco Webex, Facebook container, multi-account containers, HTTPS Everywhere, test pilot and ublock origin.
I only use one “authorized app” with Twitter and that’s Tweetdeck.
On the Android phone, I run an updated Android with an auto-updated Twitter client. That session also started over a week ago. I used Google Authenticator for 2fa.
While this hijack took place I was asleep at home (I don’t know the exact time of it), on my WiFi, so all my most relevant machines would’ve been seen as originating from the same “NATed” IP address. This info was also relayed to Twitter security.
Restored
The actual restoration happens like this (and it was the exact same the last time): I just suddenly receive an email on how to reset my password for my account.
The email is a standard one without any specifics for this case. Just a template press the big button and it takes you to the Twitter site where I can set a new password for my account. There is nothing in the mail that indicates a human was involved in sending it. There is no text explaining what happened. Oh, right, the mail also include a bunch of standard security advice like “use a strong password”, “don’t share your password with others” and “activate two factor” etc as if I hadn’t done all that already…
It would be prudent of Twitter to explain how this happened, at least roughly and without revealing sensitive details. If it was my fault somehow, or if I just made it easier because of something in my end, I would really like to know so that I can do better in the future.
What was done to it?
No tweets were sent. The name and profile picture remained intact. I’ve not seen any DMs sent or received from while the account was “kidnapped”. Given this, it seems possible that the attacker actually only managed to change the associated account email address.
HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a standard HTTP response header for sites to tell the client that for a specified period of time into the future, that host is not to be accessed with plain HTTP but only using HTTPS. Documented in RFC 6797 from 2012.
The idea is of course to reduce the risk for man-in-the-middle attacks when the server resources might be accessible via both HTTP and HTTPS, perhaps due to legacy or just as an upgrade path. Every access to the HTTP version is then a risk that you get back tampered content.
Browsers preload
These headers have been supported by the popular browsers for years already, and they also have a system setup for preloading a set of sites. Sites that exist in their preload list then never get accessed over HTTP since they know of their HSTS state already when the browser is fired up for the first time.
The entire .dev top-level domain is even in that preload list so you can in fact never access a web site on that top-level domain over HTTP with the major browsers.
With the curl tool
Starting in curl 7.74.0, curl has experimental support for HSTS. Experimental means it isn’t enabled by default and we discourage use of it in production. (Scheduled to be released in December 2020.)
You instruct curl to understand HSTS and to load/save a cache with HSTS information using --hsts <filename>. The HSTS cache saved into that file is then updated on exit and if you do repeated invokes with the same cache file, it will effectively avoid clear text HTTP accesses for as long as the HSTS headers tell it.
I envision that users will simply use a small hsts cache file for specific use cases rather than anyone ever really want to have or use a “complete” preload list of domains such as the one the browsers use, as that’s a huge list of sites and for most use cases just completely unnecessary to load and handle.
With libcurl
Possibly, this feature is more useful and appreciated by applications that use libcurl for HTTP(S) transfers. With libcurl the application can set a file name to use for loading and saving the cache but it also gets some added options for more flexibility and powers. Here’s a quick overview:
CURLOPT_HSTS – lets you set a file name to read/write the HSTS cache from/to.
CURLOPT_HSTSREADFUNCTION – this callback gets called by libcurl when it is about to start a transfer and lets the application preload HSTS entries – as if they had been read over the wire and been added to the cache.
CURLOPT_HSTSWRITEFUNCTION – this callback gets called repeatedly when libcurl flushes its in-memory cache and allows the application to save the cache somewhere and similar things.
Feedback?
I trust you understand that I’m very very keen on getting feedback on how this works, on the API and your use cases. Both negative and positive. Whatever your thoughts are really!
Earlier this year I was the recipient of a monetary Google patch grant with the expressed purpose of improving security in libcurl.
This was an upfront payout under this Google program describing itself as “an experimental program that rewards proactive security improvements to select open-source projects”.
I accepted this grant for the curl project and I intend to keep working fiercely on securing curl. I recognize the importance of curl security as curl remains one of the most widely used software components in the world, and even one that is doing network data transfers which typically is a risky business. curl is responsible for a measurable share of all Internet transfers done over the Internet an average day. My job is to make sure those transfers are done as safe and secure as possible. It isn’t my only responsibility of course, as I have other tasks to attend to as well, but still.
Do more
Security is already and always a top priority in the curl project and for myself personally. This grant will of course further my efforts to strengthen curl and by association, all the many users of it.
What I will not do
When security comes up in relation to curl, some people like to mention and propagate for other programming languages, But curl will not be rewritten in another language. Instead we will increase our efforts in writing good C and detecting problems in our code earlier and better.
Proactive counter-measures
Things we have done lately and working on to enforce everywhere:
String and buffer size limits – all string inputs and all buffers in libcurl that are allowed to grow now have a maximum allowed size, that makes sense. This stops malicious uses that could make things grow out of control and it helps detecting programming mistakes that would lead to the same problems. Also, by making sure strings and buffers are never ridiculously large, we avoid a whole class of integer overflow risks better.
Unified dynamic buffer functions – by reducing the number of different implementations that handle “growing buffers” we reduce the risk of a bug in one of them, even if it is used rarely or the spot is hard to reach with and “exercise” by the fuzzers. The “dynbuf” internal API first shipped in curl 7.71.0 (June 2020).
Realloc buffer growth unification – pretty much the same point as the previous, but we have earlier in our history had several issues when we had silly realloc() treatment that could lead to bad things. By limiting string sizes and unifying the buffer functions, we have reduced the number of places we use realloc and thus we reduce the number of places risking new realloc mistakes. The realloc mistakes were usually in combination with integer overflows.
Code style – we’ve gradually improved our code style checker (checksrc.pl) over time and we’ve also gradually made our code style more strict, leading to less variations in code, in white spacing and in naming. I’m a firm believer this makes the code look more coherent and therefore become more readable which leads to fewer bugs and easier to debug code. It also makes it easier to grep and search for code as you have fewer variations to scan for.
More code analyzers – we run every commit and PR through a large number of code analyzers to help us catch mistakes early, and we always remove detected problems. Analyzers used at the time of this writing: lgtm.com, Codacy, Deepcode AI, Monocle AI, clang tidy, scan-build, CodeQL, Muse and Coverity. That’s of course in addition to the regular run-time tools such as valgrind and sanitizer builds that run the entire test suite.
Memory-safe components – curl already supports getting built with a plethora of different libraries and “backends” to cater for users’ needs and desires. By properly supporting and offering users to build with components that are written in for example rust – or other languages that help developers avoid pitfalls – future curl and libcurl builds could potentially avoid a whole section of risks. (Stay tuned for more on this topic in a near future.)
Reactive measures
Recognizing that whatever we do and however tight ship we run, we will continue to slip every once in a while, is important and we should make sure we find and fix such slip-ups as good and early as possible.
Raising bounty rewards. While not directly fixing things, offering more money in our bug-bounty program helps us get more attention from security researchers. Our ambition is to gently drive up the reward amounts progressively to perhaps multi-thousand dollars per flaw, as long as we have funds to pay for them and we mange keep the security vulnerabilities at a reasonably low frequency.
More fuzzing. I’ve said it before but let me say it again: fuzzing is really the top method to find problems in curl once we’ve fixed all flaws that the static analyzers we use have pointed out. The primary fuzzing for curl is done by OSS-Fuzz, that tirelessly keeps hammering on the most recent curl code.
Good fuzzing needs a certain degree of “hand-holding” to allow it to really test all the APIs and dig into the dustiest corners, and we should work on adding more “probes” and entry-points into libcurl for the fuzzer to make it exercise more code paths to potentially detect more mistakes.
We have started the work on extending wolfSSL to provide the necessary API calls to power QUIC and HTTP/3 implementations!
Small, fast and FIPS
The TLS library known as wolfSSL is already very often a top choice when users are looking for a small and yet very fast TLS stack that supports all the latest protocol features; including TLS 1.3 support – open source with commercial support available.
As manufacturers of IoT devices and other systems with memory, CPU and footprint constraints are looking forward to following the Internet development and switching over to upcoming QUIC and HTTP/3 protocols, wolfSSL is here to help users take that step.
A QUIC reminder
In case you have forgot, here’s a schematic view of HTTPS stacks, old vs new. On the right side you can see HTTP/3, QUIC and the little TLS 1.3 box there within QUIC.
ngtcp2
There are no plans to write a full QUIC stack. There are already plenty of those. We’re talking about adjustments and extensions of the existing TLS library API set to make sure wolfSSL can be used as the TLS component in a QUIC stack.
One of the leading QUIC stacks and so far the only one I know of that does this, ngtcp2 is written to be TLS library agnostic and allows different TLS libraries to be plugged in as different backends. I believe it makes perfect sense to make such a plugin for wolfSSL to be a sensible step as soon as there’s code to try out.
A neat effect of that, would be that once wolfSSL works as a backend to ngtcp2, it should be possible to do full-fledged HTTP/3 transfers using curl powered by ngtcp2+wolfSSL. Contact us with other ideas for QUIC stacks you would like us to test wolfSSL with!
FIPS 140-2
We expect wolfSSL to be the first FIPS-based implementation to add support for QUIC. I hear this is valuable to a number of users.
When
This work begins now and this is just a blog post of our intentions. We and I will of course love to get your feedback on this and whatever else that is related. We’re also interested to get in touch with people and companies who want to be early testers of our implementation. You know where to find us!
I can promise you that the more interest we can sense to exist for this effort, the sooner we will see the first code to test out.
It seems likely that we’re not going to support any older TLS drafts for QUIC than draft-29.
On April 22nd 2019, we announced our current, this, incarnation of the curl bug bounty. In association with Hackerone we now run the program ourselves, primarily funded by gracious sponsors. Time to take a closer look at how the first year of bug bounty has been!
Number of reports
We’ve received a total of 112 reports during this period.
On average, we respond with a first comment to reports within the first hour and we triage them on average within the first day.
Out of the 112 reports, 6 were found actual security problems.
Total amount of reports vs actual security problems, per month during the first year of the curl hackerone bug bounty program.
Bounties
All confirmed security problems were rewarded a bounty. We started out a bit careful with the amounts but we are determined to raise them as we go along and we’ve seen that there’s not really a tsunami coming.
We’ve handed out 1,400 USD so far, which makes it an average of 233 USD per confirmed report. The top earner got two reports rewarded and received 450 USD from us. So far…
But again: our ambition is to significantly raise these amounts going forward.
Trends
The graph above speaks clearly: lots of people submitted reports when we opened up and the submission frequency has dropped significantly over the year.
A vast majority of the 112 reports we’ve received have were more or less rubbish and/or more or less automated reports. A large amount of users have reported that our wiki can be edited by anyone (which I consider to be a fundamental feature of a wiki) or other things that we’ve expressly said is not covered by the program: specific details about our web hosting, email setup or DNS config.
A rough estimate says that around 80% of the reports were quickly dismissed as “out of policy” – ie they reported stuff that we documented is not covered by the bug bounty (“Sirs, we can figure out what http server that’s running” etc). The curl bug bounty covers the products curl and libcurl, thus their source code and related specifics.
Bounty funds
curl has no ties to any organization. curl is not owned by any corporation. curl is developed by individuals. All the funds we have in the project are graciously provided to us by sponsors and donors. The curl funds are handled by the awesome Open Collective.
Security is of utmost importance to us. It trumps all other areas, goals and tasks. We aim to produce solid and secure products for the world and we act as swiftly and firmly as we can on all reported security problems.
Security vulnerability trends
We have not published a single CVE for curl yet this year (there was one announced, CVE-2019-15601 but after careful considerations we have backpedaled on that, we don’t consider it a flaw anymore and the CVE has been rejected in the records.)
As I write this, there’s been exactly 225 days since the latest curl CVE was published and we’re aiming at shipping curl 7.70.0 next week as the 6th release in a row without a security vulnerability to accompany it. We haven’t done 6 “clean” consecutive release like this since early 2013!
Looking at the number of CVEs reported in the curl project per year, we can of course see that 2016 stands out. That was the year of the security audit that ended up the release of curl 7.51.0 with no less than eleven security vulnerabilities announced and fixed. Better is of course the rightmost bar over the year 2020 label. It is still non-existent!
The most recent CVEs per year graph is always found: here.
As you can see in the graph below, the “plateau” in the top right is at 92 published CVEs. The previous record holder for longest period in the project without a CVE ended in February 2013 (with CVE-2013-0249) at 379 days.
2013 was however quite a different era for curl. Less code, much less scrutinizing, no bug bounty, lesser tools, no CI jobs etc.
Number of published CVEs in the curl project over time. The updated graph is always found: here.
Are we improving?
Is curl getting more secure?
We have more code and support more protocols than ever. We have a constant influx of new authors and contributors. We probably have more users than ever before in history.
At the same time we offer better incentives than ever before for people to report security bugs. We run more CI jobs than ever that run more and more test cases while code analyzers and memory debugging are making it easier to detect problems earlier. There are also more people looking for security bugs in curl than ever before.
Jinx?
I’m under no illusion that there aren’t more flaws to find, report and fix. We’re all humans and curl is still being developed at a fairly high pace.
The Windows operating system will automatically, and without any way for applications to disable it, try 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 attempts 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’ve 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 and library cannot protect users against. It would just be a whack-a-mole race we don’t want to participate in. There are too many ways to do it and there’s no knob we can use to turn off the practice.
We no longer consider this to be a curl security flaw!
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” will potentially make your system try to access other hosts on your network. curl cannot protect you against this.
This was previously considered a curl security problem, as reported in CVE-2019-15601. We no longer consider that a security flaw and have updated that web page with information matching our new findings. I don’t expect any other CVE database to update since there’s no established mechanism for updating CVEs!
Credits
Many thanks to Tim Sedlmeyer who highlighted the extent of this issue for us.
In a Blackhat 2019 presentation, three gentlemen from the Tencent Blade Team explained how they found and managed to exploit two curl flaws. Both related to NTLM over HTTP. The “client version Heartbleed” as they call it.
Reported responsibly
The Tencent team already reported the bugs responsibly to us and we already fixed them back in February 2019, but the talk is still very interesting I think.
From my point of view, as I have already discussed these bugs with the team when they were reported us and when I worked on fixing them, I find it very interesting and educational to learn more about how exactly they envision an attacker would go about and exploit them in practice. I have much too bad imagination sometimes to really think of how bad exactly the problems can end up when a creative attacker gets to play with them.
The security issues
The two specific issues these stellar gents found are already fixed since curl 7.64.0 and you can read all the gory details about them here: CVE-2018-16890 and CVE-2019-3822. The latter is clearly the worse issue.
For all I know, these exploits have never been seen or reported to happen in real life.
Upgrade?
Luckily, most distros that ship older curl versions still back-port and apply later security patches so even if you may see that you have an older curl version installed on your system, chances are it has already been patched. Of course there’s also a risk that it hasn’t, so you should probably make sure rather than presume…
The video
The slides from their presentation. (The talk also details SQLite issues but they’re completely separate from the curl ones.)
Bug Bounty?
Unfortunately, I’m sorry to admit that these excellent friends of ours did not get a bug bounty from us! 🙁
We got their reports before our bug bounty was setup and we didn’t have neither the means nor the methods to reward them back then. If someone would report such serious bugs now, only a year later, we would probably reward new such findings with several thousand dollars.
On NTLM
NTLM was always wrong, bad and a hack. It’s not an excuse for having bugs in our code but man if someone could just please make that thing go away…
