Category Archives: Security

cURL and libcurl, Security

Report: curl’s bug bounty one year in

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.

Please report more security bugs!

Credits

Top image by Luisella Planeta Leoni from Pixabay

cURL and libcurl, Security, Windows

Warning: curl users on Windows using FILE://

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.

We have updated relevant curl and libcurl documentation to make users on Windows aware of what using FILE:// URLs can trigger (this commit) and posted a warning notice on the curl-library mailing list.

Previous security advisory

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.

cURL and libcurl, Security

Remote-exploiting curl

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…

cURL and libcurl, Security, wolfSSL

curl even more wolfed

I’m happy to announce that curl now supports a third SSH library option: wolfSSH. Using this, you can build curl and libcurl to do SFTP transfers in a really small footprint that’s perfectly suitable for embedded systems and others. This goes excellent together with the tiny-curl effort.

SFTP only

The initial merge of this functionality only provides SFTP ability and not SCP. There’s really no deeper thoughts behind this other than that the work has been staged and the code is smaller for SFTP-only and it might be that users on these smaller devices are happy with SFTP-only.

Work on adding SCP support for the wolfSSH backend can be done at a later time if we feel the need. Let me know if you’re one such user!

Build time selection

You select which SSH backend to use at build time. When you invoke the configure script, you decide if wolfSSH, libssh2 or libssh is the correct choice for you (and you need to have the correct dev version of the desired library installed).

The initial SFTP and SCP support was added to curl in November 2006, powered by libssh2 (the first release to ship it was 7.16.1). Support for getting those protocols handled by libssh instead (which is a separate library, they’re just named very similarly) was merged in October 2017.

Number of supported SSH backends over time in the curl project.

WolfSSH uses WolfSSL functions

If you decide to use the wolfSSH backend for SFTP, it is also possibly a good idea to go with WolfSSL for the TLS backend to power HTTPS and others.

A plethora of third party libs

WolfSSH becomes the 32nd third party component that curl can currently be built to use. See the slide below and click on it to get the full resolution version.

32 possible third party dependencies curl can be built to use

Credits

I, Daniel, wrote the initial new wolfSSH backend code. Merged in this commit.

Wolf image by David Mark from Pixabay

cURL and libcurl, Security, wolfSSL

FIPS ready with curl

Download wolfSSL fips ready (in my case I got wolfssl-4.1.0-gplv3-fips-ready.zip)

Unzip the source code somewhere suitable

$ cd $HOME/src
$ unzip wolfssl-4.1.0-gplv3-fips-ready.zip
$ cd wolfssl-4.1.0-gplv3-fips-ready

Build the fips-ready wolfSSL and install it somewhere suitable

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/wolfssl-fips --enable-harden --enable-all
$ make -sj
$ make install

Download curl, the normal curl package. (in my case I got curl 7.65.3)

Unzip the source code somewhere suitable

$ cd $HOME/src
$ unzip curl-7.65.3.zip
$ cd curl-7.65.3

Build curl with the just recently built and installed fips ready wolfSSL version.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/wolfssl-fips/lib ./configure --with-wolfssl=$HOME/wolfssl-fips --without-ssl
$ make -sj

Now, verify that your new build matches your expectations by:

$ ./src/curl -V

It should show that it uses wolfSSL and that all the protocols and features you want are enabled and present. If not, iterate until it does!

“FIPS Ready means that you have included the FIPS code into your build and that you are operating according to the FIPS enforced best practices of default entry point, and Power On Self Test (POST).”

cURL and libcurl, Security

Report from the curl bounty program

We announced our glorious return to the “bug bounty club” (projects that run bug bounties) a month ago, and with the curl 7.65.0 release today on May 22nd of 2019 we also ship fixes to security vulnerabilities that were reported within this bug bounty program.

Announcement

Even before we publicly announced the program, it was made public on the Hackerone site. That was obviously enough to get noticed by people and we got the first reports immediately!

We have received 19 reports so far.

Infrastructure scans

Quite clearly some people have some scripts laying around and they do some pretty standard things on projects that pop up on hackerone. We immediately got a number of reports that reported variations of the same two things repeatedly:

  1. Our wiki is world editable. In my world I’ve lived under the assumption that this is how a wiki is meant to be but we ended up having to specifically mention this on curl’s hackerone page: yes it is open for everyone on purpose.
  2. Sending emails forging them to look like the come from the curl web site might work since our DNS doesn’t have SPF, DKIM etc setup. This is a somewhat better report, but our bounty program is dedicated for and focused on the actual curl and libcurl products. Not our infrastructure.

Bounties!

Within two days of the program’s life time, the first legit report had been filed and then within a few more days a second arrived. They are CVE-2019-5435 and CVE-2019-5436, explained somewhat in my curl 7.65.0 release post but best described in their individual advisories, linked to below.

I’m thrilled to report that these two reporters were awarded money for their findings:

Wenchao Li was awarded 150 USD for finding and reporting CVE-2019-5435.

l00p3r was awarded 200 USD for finding and reporting CVE-2019-5436.

Both these issues were rated severity level “Low” and we consider them rather obscure and not likely to hurt very many users.

Donate to help us fund this!

Please notice that we are entirely depending on donated funds to be able to run this program. If you use curl and benefit from a more secure curl, please consider donating a little something for the cause!

cURL and libcurl, Security

curl + hackerone = TRUE

There seems to be no end to updated posts about bug bounties in the curl project these days. Not long ago I mentioned the then new program that sadly enough was cancelled only a few months after its birth.

Now we are back with a new and refreshed bug bounty program! The curl bug bounty program reborn.

This new program, which hopefully will manage to survive a while, is setup in cooperation with the major bug bounty player out there: hackerone.

Basic rules

If you find or suspect a security related issue in curl or libcurl, report it! (and don’t speak about it in public at all until an agreed future date.)

You’re entitled to ask for a bounty for all and every valid and confirmed security problem that wasn’t already reported and that exists in the latest public release.

The curl security team will then assess the report and the problem and will then reward money depending on bug severity and other details.

Where does the money come from?

We intend to use funds and money from wherever we can. The Hackerone Internet Bug Bounty program helps us, donations collected over at opencollective will be used as well as dedicated company sponsorships.

We will of course also greatly appreciate any direct sponsorships from companies for this program. You can help curl getting even better by adding funds to the bounty program and help us reward hard-working researchers.

Why bounties at all?

We compete for the security researchers’ time and attention with other projects, both open and proprietary. The projects that can help put food on these researchers’ tables might have a better chance of getting them to use their tools, time, skills and fingers to find our problems instead of someone else’s.

Finding and disclosing security problems can be very time and resource consuming. We want to make it less likely that people give up their attempts before they find anything. We can help full and part time security engineers sustain their livelihood by paying for the fruits of their labor. At least a little bit.

Only released code?

The state of the code repository in git is not subject for bounties. We need to allow developers to do mistakes and to experiment a little in the git repository, while we expect and want every actual public release to be free from security vulnerabilities.

So yes, the obvious downside with this is that someone could spot an issue in git and decide not to report it since it doesn’t give any money and hope that the flaw will linger around and ship in the release – and then reported it and claim reward money. I think we just have to trust that this will not be a standard practice and if we in fact notice that someone tries to exploit the bounty in this manner, we can consider counter-measures then.

How about money for the patches?

There’s of course always a discussion as to why we should pay anyone for bugs and then why just pay for reported security problems and not for heroes who authored the code in the first place and neither for the good people who write the patches to fix the reported issues. Those are valid questions and we would of course rather pay every contributor a lot of money, but we don’t have the funds for that. And getting funding for this kind of dedicated bug bounties seem to be doable, where as a generic pay contributors fund is trickier both to attract money but it is also really hard to distribute in an open project of curl’s nature.

How much money?

At the start of this program the award amounts are as following. We reward up to this amount of money for vulnerabilities of the following security levels:

Critical: 2,000 USD
High: 1,500 USD
Medium: 1,000 USD
Low: 500 USD

Depending on how things go, how fast we drain the fund and how much companies help us refill, the amounts may change over time.

Found a security flaw?

Report it!

cURL and libcurl, Network, Security

QUIC and missing APIs

I trust you’ve heard by now that HTTP/3 is coming. It is the next destined HTTP version, targeted to get published as an RFC in July 2019. Not very far off.

HTTP/3 will not be done over TCP. It will only be performed over QUIC, which is a transport protocol replacement for TCP that always is done encrypted. There’s no clear-text version of QUIC.

TLS 1.3

The encryption in QUIC is based on TLS 1.3 technologies which I believe everyone thinks is a good idea and generally the correct decision. We need to successively raise the bar as we move forward with protocols.

However, QUIC is not only a transport protocol that does encryption by itself while TLS is typically (and designed as) a protocol that is done on top of TCP, it was also designed by a team of engineers who came up with a design that requires APIs from the TLS layer that the traditional TLS over TCP use case doesn’t need!

New TLS APIs

A QUIC implementation needs to extract traffic secrets from the TLS connection and it needs to be able to read/write TLS messages directly – not using the TLS record layer. TLS records are what’s used when we send TLS over TCP. (This was discussed and decided back around the time for the QUIC interim in Kista.)

These operations need APIs that still are missing in for example the very popular OpenSSL library, but also in other commonly used ones like GnuTLS and libressl. And of course schannel and Secure Transport.

Libraries known to already have done the job and expose the necessary mechanisms include BoringSSL, NSS, quicly, PicoTLS and Minq. All of those are incidentally TLS libraries with a more limited number of application users and less mainstream. They’re also more or less developed by people who are also actively engaged in the QUIC protocol development.

The QUIC libraries in progress now are typically using either one of the TLS libraries that already are adapted or do what ngtcp2 does: it hosts a custom-patched version of OpenSSL that brings the needed functionality.

Matt Caswell of the OpenSSL development team acknowledged this situation already back in September 2017, but so far we haven’t seen this result in updated code shipped in a released version.

curl and QUIC

curl is TLS library agnostic and can get built with around 12 different TLS libraries – one or many actually, as you can build it to allow users to select TLS backend in run-time!

OpenSSL is without competition the most popular choice to build curl with outside of the proprietary operating systems like macOS and Windows 10. But even the vendor-build and provided mac and Windows versions are also built with libraries that lack APIs for this.

With our current keen interest in QUIC and HTTP/3 support for curl, we’re about to run into an interesting TLS situation. How exactly is someone going to build curl to simultaneously support both traditional TLS based protocols as well as QUIC going forward?

I don’t have a good answer to this yet. Right now (assuming we would have the code ready in our end, which we don’t), we can’t ship QUIC or HTTP/3 support enabled for curl built to use the most popular TLS libraries! Hopefully by the time we get our code in order, the situation has improved somewhat.

This will slow down QUIC deployment

I’m personally convinced that this little API problem will be friction enough when going forward that it will slow down and hinder QUIC deployment at least initially.

When the HTTP/2 spec shipped in May 2015, it introduced a dependency on the fairly new TLS extension called ALPN that for a long time caused head aches for server admins since ALPN wasn’t supported in the OpenSSL versions that was typically installed and used at the time, but you had to upgrade OpenSSL to version 1.0.2 to get that supported.

At that time, almost four years ago, OpenSSL 1.0.2 was already released and the problem was big enough to just upgrade to that. This time, the API we’re discussing here is not even in a beta version of OpenSSL and thus hasn’t been released in any version yet. That’s far worse than the HTTP/2 situation we had and that took a few years to ride out.

Will we get these APIs into an OpenSSL release to test before the QUIC specification is done? If the schedule sticks, there’s about six months left…

Network, Security, Web

My talks at FOSDEM 2019

3 Comments

I’ll be celebrating my 10th FOSDEM when I travel down to Brussels again in early February 2019. That’s ten years in a row. It’ll also be the 6th year I present something there, as I’ve done these seven talks in the past:

My past FOSDEM appearances

2010. I talked Rockbox in the embedded room.

2011. libcurl, seven SSL libs and one SSH lib in the security room.

2015. Internet all the things – using curl in your device. In the embedded room.

2015. HTTP/2 right now. In the Mozilla room.

2016. an HTTP/2 update. In the Mozilla room.

2017. curl. On the main track.

2017. So that was HTTP/2, what’s next? In the Mozilla room.

DNS over HTTPS – the good, the bad and the ugly

On the main track, in Janson at 15:00 on Saturday 2nd of February.

DNS over HTTPS (aka “DoH”, RFC 8484) introduces a new transport protocol to do secure and private DNS messaging. Why was it made, how does it work and how users are free (to resolve names).

The presentation will discuss reasons why DoH was deemed necessary and interesting to ship and deploy and how it compares to alternative technologies that offer similar properties. It will discuss how this protocol “liberates” users and offers stronger privacy (than the typical status quo).

How to enable and start using DoH today.

It will also discuss some downsides with DoH and what you should consider before you decide to use a random DoH server on the Internet.

HTTP/3

In the Mozilla room, at 11:30 on Saturday 2nd of February.

HTTP/3 is the next coming HTTP version.

This time TCP is replaced by the new transport protocol QUIC and things are different yet again! This is a presentation about HTTP/3 and QUIC with a following Q&A about everything HTTP. Join us at Goto 10.

HTTP/3 is the designated name for the coming next version of the protocol that is currently under development within the QUIC working group in the IETF.

HTTP/3 is designed to improve in areas where HTTP/2 still has some shortcomings, primarily by changing the transport layer. HTTP/3 is the first major protocol to step away from TCP and instead it uses QUIC. I’ll talk about HTTP/3 and QUIC. Why the new protocols are deemed necessary, how they work, how they change how things are sent over the network and what some of the coming deployment challenges will be.

DNS Privacy panel

In the DNS room, at 11:55 on Sunday 3rd of February.

This isn’t strictly a prepared talk or presentation but I’ll still be there and participate in the panel discussion on DNS privacy. I hope to get most of my finer points expressed in the DoH talk mentioned above, but I’m fully prepared to elaborate on some of them in this session.

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Security

Get the CA cert for curl

When you use curl to communicate with a HTTPS site (or any other protocol that uses TLS), it will by default verify that the server is signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). It does this by checking the CA bundle it was built to use, or instructed to use with the –cacert command line option.

Sometimes you end up in a situation where you don’t have the necessary CA cert in your bundle. It could then look something like this:

$ curl https://example.com/
curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: self signed certificate
More details here: https://curl.se/docs/sslcerts.html

Do not disable!

A first gut reaction could be to disable the certificate check. Don’t do that. You’ll just make that end up in production or get copied by someone else and then you’ll spread the insecure use to other places and eventually cause a security problem.

Get the CA cert

I’ll show you four different ways to fix this.

1. Update your OS CA store

Operating systems come with a CA bundle of their own and on most of them, curl is setup to use the system CA store. A system update often makes curl work again.

This of course doesn’t help you if you have a self-signed certificate or otherwise use a CA that your operating system doesn’t have in its trust store.

2. Get an updated CA bundle from us

curl can be told to use a separate stand-alone file as CA store, and conveniently enough curl provides an updated one on the curl web site. That one is automatically converted from the one Mozilla provides for Firefox, updated daily. It also provides a little backlog so the ten most recent CA stores are available.

If you agree to trust the same CAs that Firefox trusts. This is a good choice.

3. Get it with openssl

Now we’re approaching the less good options. It’s way better to get the CA certificates via other means than from the actual site you’re trying to connect to!

This method uses the openssl command line tool. The servername option used below is there to set the SNI field, which often is necessary to tell the server which actual site’s certificate you want.

$ echo quit | openssl s_client -showcerts -servername server -connect server:443 > cacert.pem

A real world example, getting the certs for daniel.haxx.se and then getting the main page with curl using them:

$ echo quit | openssl s_client -showcerts -servername daniel.haxx.se -connect daniel.haxx.se:443 > cacert.pem

$ curl --cacert cacert.pem https://daniel.haxx.se
4. Get it with Firefox

Suppose you’re browsing the site already fine with Firefox. Then you can do inspect it using the browser and export to use with curl.

Step 1 – click the i in the circle on the left of the URL in the address bar of your browser.

Step 2 – click the right arrow on the right side in the drop-down window that appeared.

Step 3 – new contents appeared, now click the “More Information” at the bottom, which pops up a new separate window…

Step 4 – Here you get security information from Firefox about the site you’re visiting. Click the “View Certificate” button on the right. It pops up yet another separate window.

Step 5 – in this window full of certificate information, select the “Details” tab…

Step 6 – when switched to the details tab, there’s the certificate hierarchy shown at the top and we select the top choice there. This list will of course look different for different sites

Step 7 – now click the “Export” tab at the bottom left and save the file (that uses a .crt extension) somewhere suitable.

If you for example saved the exported certificate using in /tmp, you could then use curl with that saved certificate something like this:

$ curl --cacert /tmp/GlobalSignRootCA-R3.crt https://curl.se

But I’m not using openssl!

This description assumes you’re using a curl that uses a CA bundle in the PEM format, which not all do – in particular not the ones built with NSS, Schannel (native Windows) or Secure Transport (native macOS and iOS) don’t.

If you use one of those, you need to then add additional command to import the PEM formatted cert into the particular CA store of yours.

A CA store is many PEM files concatenated

Just concatenate many different PEM files into a single file to create a CA store with multiple certificates.