Category Archives: Security

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

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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.

Network, Security

DNS-over-HTTPS is RFC 8484

The protocol we fondly know as DoH, DNS-over-HTTPS, is now  officially RFC 8484 with the official title “DNS Queries over HTTPS (DoH)”. It documents the protocol that is already in production and used by several client-side implementations, including Firefox, Chrome and curl. Put simply, DoH sends a regular RFC 1035 DNS packet over HTTPS instead of over plain UDP.

I’m happy to have contributed my little bits to this standard effort and I’m credited in the Acknowledgements section. I’ve also implemented DoH client-side several times now.

Firefox has done studies and tests in cooperation with a CDN provider (which has sometimes made people conflate Firefox’s DoH support with those studies and that operator). These studies have shown and proven that DoH is a working way for many users to do secure name resolves at a reasonable penalty cost. At least when using a fallback to the native resolver for the tricky situations. In general DoH resolves are slower than the native ones but in the tail end, the absolutely slowest name resolves got a lot better with the DoH option.

To me, DoH is partly necessary because the “DNS world” has failed to ship and deploy secure and safe name lookups to the masses and this is the one way applications “one layer up” can still secure our users.

cURL and libcurl, Security

More curl bug bounty

Together with Bountygraph, the curl project now offers money to security researchers for report security vulnerabilities to us.

https://bountygraph.com/programs/curl

The idea is that sponsors donate money to the bounty fund, and we will use that fund to hand out rewards for reported issues. It is a way for the curl project to help compensate researchers for the time and effort they spend helping us improving our security.

Right now the bounty fund is very small as we just started this project, but hopefully we can get a few sponsors interested and soon offer “proper” rewards at decent levels in case serious flaws are detected and reported here.

If you’re a company using curl or libcurl and value security, you know what you can do…

Already before, people who reported security problems could ask for money from Hackerone’s IBB program, and this new program is in addition to that – even though you won’t be able to receive money from both bounties for the same issue.

After I announced this program on twitter yesterday, I did an interview with Arif Khan for latesthackingnews.com. Here’s what I had to say:

A few questions

Q: You have launched a self-managed bug bounty program for the first time. Earlier, IBB used to pay out for most security issues in libcurl. How do you think the idea of self-management of a bug bounty program, which has some obvious problems such as active funding might eventually succeed?

First, this bounty program is run on bountygraph.com so I wouldn’t call it “self-managed” since we’re standing on a lot of infra setup and handled by others.

To me, this is an attempt to make a bounty program that is more visible as clearly a curl bounty program. I love Hackerone and the IBB program for what they offer, but it is A) very generic, so the fact that you can get money for curl flaws there is not easy to figure out and there’s no obvious way for companies to sponsor curl security research and B) they are very picky to which flaws they pay money for (“only critical flaws”) and I hope this program can be a little more accommodating – assuming we get sponsors of course.

Will it work and make any differences compared to IBB? I don’t know. We will just have to see how it plays out.

Q: How do you think the crowdsourcing model is going to help this bug bounty program?

It’s crucial. If nobody sponsors this program, there will be no money to do payouts with and without payouts there are no bounties. Then I’d call the curl bounty program a failure. But we’re also not in a hurry. We can give this some time to see how it works out.

My hope is though that because curl is such a widely used component, we will get sponsors interested in helping out.

Q: What would be the maximum reward for most critical a.k.a. P0 security vulnerabilities for this program?

Right now we have a total of 500 USD to hand out. If you report a p0 bug now, I suppose you’ll get that. If we just get sponsors, I’m hoping we should be able to raise that reward level significantly. I might be very naive, but I think we won’t have to pay for very many critical flaws.

It goes back to the previous question: this model will only work if we get sponsors.

Q: Do you feel there’s a risk that bounty hunters could turn malicious?

I don’t think this bounty program particularly increases or reduces that risk to any significant degree. Malicious hunters probably already exist and I would assume that blackhat researchers might be able to extract more money on the less righteous markets if they’re so inclined. I don’t think we can “outbid” such buyers with this program.

Q: How will this new program mutually benefit security researchers as well as the open source community around curl as a whole?

Again, assuming that this works out…

Researchers can get compensated for the time and efforts they spend helping the curl project to produce and provide a more secure product to the world.

curl is used by virtually every connected device in the world in one way or another, affecting every human in the connected world on a daily basis. By making sure curl is secure we keep users safe; users of countless devices, applications and networked infrastructure.

Update: just hours after this blog post, Dropbox chipped in 32,768 USD to the curl bounty fund…

Firefox, Mozilla, Security, Web

How to DoH-only with Firefox

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Firefox supports DNS-over-HTTPS (aka DoH) since version 62.

You can instruct your Firefox to only use DoH and never fall-back and try the native resolver; the mode we call trr-only. Without any other ability to resolve host names, this is a little tricky so this guide is here to help you. (This situation might improve in the future.)

In trr-only mode, nobody on your local network nor on your ISP can snoop on your name resolves. The SNI part of HTTPS connections are still clear text though, so eavesdroppers on path can still figure out which hosts you connect to.

There’s a name in my URI

A primary problem for trr-only is that we usually want to use a host name in the URI for the DoH server (we typically need it to be a name so that we can verify the server’s certificate against it), but we can’t resolve that host name until DoH is setup to work. A catch-22.

There are currently two ways around this problem:

  1. Tell Firefox the IP address of the name that you use in the URI. We call it the “bootstrapAddress”. See further below.
  2. Use a DoH server that is provided on an IP-number URI. This is rather unusual. There’s for example one at 1.1.1.1.

Setup and use trr-only

There are three prefs to focus on (they’re all explained elsewhere):

network.trr.mode – set this to the number 3.

network.trr.uri – set this to the URI of the DoH server you want to use. This should be a server you trust and want to hand over your name resolves to. The Cloudflare one we’ve previously used in DoH tests with Firefox is https://mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query.

network.trr.bootstrapAddress– when you use a host name in the URI for the network.trr.uri pref you must set this pref to an IP address that host name resolves to for you. It is important that you pick an IP address that the name you use actually would resolve to.

Example

Let’s pretend you want to go full trr-only and use a DoH server at https://example.com/dns. (it’s a pretend URI, it doesn’t work).

Figure out the bootstrapAddress with dig. Resolve the host name from the URI:

$ dig +short example.com
93.184.216.34

or if you prefer to be classy and use the IPv6 address (only do this if IPv6 is actually working for you)

$ dig -t AAAA +short example.com
2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946

dig might give you a whole list of addresses back, and then you can pick any one of them in the list. Only pick one address though.

Go to “about:config” and paste the copied IP address into the value field for network.trr.bootstrapAddress. Now TRR / DoH should be able to get going. When you can see web pages, you know it works!

DoH-only means only DoH

If you happen to start Firefox behind a captive portal while in trr-only mode, the connections to the DoH server will fail and no name resolves can be performed.

In those situations, normally Firefox’s captive portable detector would trigger and show you the login page etc, but when no names can be resolved and the captive portal can’t respond with a fake response to the name lookup and redirect you to the login, it won’t get anywhere. It gets stuck. And currently, there’s no good visual indication anywhere that this is what happens.

You simply can’t get out of a captive portal with trr-only. You probably then temporarily switch mode, login to the portal and switch the mode to 3 again.

If you “unlock” the captive portal with another browser/system, Firefox’s regular retries while in trr-only will soon detect that and things should start working again.

Firefox, Mozilla, Network, Security

quic wg interim Kista

The IETF QUIC working group had its fifth interim meeting the other day, this time in Kista, Sweden hosted by Ericsson. For me as a Stockholm resident, this was ridiculously convenient. Not entirely coincidentally, this was also the first quic interim I attended in person.

We were 30 something persons gathered in a room without windows, with another dozen or so participants joining from remote. This being a meeting in a series, most people already know each other from before so the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. Lots of the participants have also been involved in other protocol developments and standards before. Many familiar faces.

Schedule

As QUIC is supposed to be done “soon”, the emphasis is now a lot to close issues, postpone some stuff to “QUICv2” and make sure to get decisions on outstanding question marks.

Kazuho did a quick run-through with some info from the interop days prior to the meeting.

After MT’s initial explanation of where we’re at for the upcoming draft-13, Ian took us a on a deep dive into the Stream 0 Design Team report. This is a pretty radical change of how the wire format of the quic protocol, and how the TLS is being handled.

The existing draft-12 approach…

Is suggested to instead become…

What’s perhaps the most interesting take away here is that the new format doesn’t use TLS records anymore – but simplifies a lot of other things. Not using TLS records but still doing TLS means that a QUIC implementation needs to get data from the TLS layer using APIs that existing TLS libraries don’t typically provide. PicoTLS, Minq, BoringSSL. NSS already have or will soon provide the necessary APIs. Slightly behind, OpenSSL should offer it in a nightly build soon but the impression is that it is still a bit away from an actual OpenSSL release.

EKR continued the theme. He talked about the quic handshake flow and among other things explained how 0-RTT and early data works. Taken from that context, I consider this slide (shown below) fairly funny because it makes it look far from simple to me. But it shows communication in different layers, and how the acks go, etc.

HTTP

Mike then presented the state of HTTP over quic. The frames are no longer that similar to the HTTP/2 versions. Work is done to ensure that the HTTP layer doesn’t need to refer or “grab” stream IDs from the transport layer.

There was a rather lengthy discussion around how to handle “placeholder streams” like the ones Firefox uses over HTTP/2 to create “anchors” on which to make dependencies but are never actually used over the wire. The nature of the quic transport makes those impractical and we talked about what alternatives there are that could still offer similar functionality.

The subject of priorities and dependencies and if the relative complexity of the h2 model should be replaced by something simpler came up (again) but was ultimately pushed aside.

QPACK

Alan presented the state of QPACK, the HTTP header compression algorithm for hq (HTTP over QUIC). It is not wire compatible with HPACK anymore and there have been some recent improvements and clarifications done.

Alan also did a great step-by-step walk-through how QPACK works with adding headers to the dynamic table and how it works with its indices etc. It was very clarifying I thought.

The discussion about the static table for the compression basically ended with us agreeing that we should just agree on a fairly small fixed table without a way to negotiate the table. Mark said he’d try to get some updated header data from some server deployments to get another data set than just the one from WPT (which is from a single browser).

Interop-testing of QPACK implementations can be done by encode  + shuffle + decode a HAR file and compare the results with the source data. Just do it – and talk to Alan!

And the first day was over. A fully packed day.

ECN

Magnus started off with some heavy stuff talking Explicit Congestion Notification in QUIC and it how it is intended to work and some remaining issues.

He also got into the subject of ACK frequency and how the current model isn’t ideal in every situation, causing to work like this image below (from Magnus’ slide set):

Interestingly, it turned out that several of the implementers already basically had implemented Magnus’ proposal of changing the max delay to min(RTT/4, 25 ms) independently of each other!

mvfst deployment

Subodh took us on a journey with some great insights from Facebook’s deployment of mvfast internally, their QUIC implementation. Getting some real-life feedback is useful and with over 100 billion requests/day, it seems they did give this a good run.

Since their usage and stack for this is a bit use case specific I’m not sure how relevant or universal their performance numbers are. They showed roughly the same CPU and memory use, with a 70% RPS rate compared to h2 over TLS 1.2.

He also entertained us with some “fun issues” from bugs and debugging sessions they’ve done and learned from. Awesome.

The story highlights the need for more tooling around QUIC to help developers and deployers.

Load balancers

Martin talked about load balancers and servers, and how they could or should communicate to work correctly with routing and connection IDs.

The room didn’t seem overly thrilled about this work and mostly offered other ways to achieve the same results.

Implicit Open

During the last session for the day and the entire meeting, was mt going through a few things that still needed discussion or closure. On stateless reset and the rather big bike shed issue: implicit open. The later being the question if opening a stream with ID N + 1 implicitly also opens the stream with ID N. I believe we ended with a slight preference to the implicit approach and this will be taken to the list for a consensus call.

Frame type extensibility

How should the QUIC protocol allow extensibility? The oldest still open issue in the project can be solved or satisfied in numerous different ways and the discussion waved back and forth for a while, debating various approaches merits and downsides until the group more or less agreed on a fairly simple and straight forward approach where the extensions will announce support for a feature which then may or may involve one or more new frame types (to be in a registry).

We proceeded to discuss other issues all until “closing time”, which was set to be 16:00 today. This was just two days of pushing forward but still it felt quite intense and my personal impression is that there were a lot of good progress made here that took the protocol a good step forward.

The facilities were lovely and Ericsson was a great host for us. The Thursday afternoon cakes were great! Thank you!

Coming up

There’s an IETF meeting in Montreal in July and there’s a planned next QUIC interim probably in New York in September.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source, Security

Play TLS 1.3 with curl

The IESG recently approved the TLS 1.3 draft-28 for proposed standard and we can expect the real RFC for this protocol version to appear soon (within a few months probably).

TLS 1.3 has been in development for quite some time by now, and a lot of TLS libraries already support it to some extent. At varying draft levels.

curl and libcurl has supported an explicit option to select TLS 1.3 since curl 7.52.0 (December 2016) and assuming you build curl to use a TLS library with support, you’ve been able to use TLS 1.3 with curl since at least then. The support has gradually been expanded to cover more and more libraries since then.

Today, curl and libcurl support speaking TLS 1.3 if you build it to use one of these fine TLS libraries of a recent enough version:

  • OpenSSL
  • BoringSSL
  • libressl
  • NSS
  • WolfSSL
  • Secure Transport (on iOS 11 or later, and macOS 10.13 or later)

GnuTLS seems to be well on their way too. TLS 1.3 support exists in the GnuTLS master branch on gitlab.

curl’s TLS 1.3-support makes it possible to select TLS 1.3 as preferred minimum version.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Security

GAAAAAH

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That’s the thought that ran through my head when I read the email I had just received.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAH

You know the feeling when the realization hits you that you did something really stupid? And you did it hours ago and people already noticed so its too late to pretend it didn’t happen or try to cover it up and whistle innocently. Nope, none of those options were available anymore. The truth was out there.

I had messed up royally.

What triggered this sudden journey of emotions and sharp sense of pain in my soul, was an email I received at 10:18, Friday March 9 2018. The encrypted email pointed out to me in clear terms that there was information available publicly on the curl web site about the security vulnerabilities that we intended to announce in association with the next curl release, on March 21. (The person who emailed me is a member of a group that was informed by me about these issues ahead of time.)

In the curl project, we never reveal nor show any information about known security flaws until we ship fixes for them and publish their corresponding security advisories that explain the flaws, the risks, the fixes and work-arounds in detail. This of course in the name of keeping users safe. We don’t want bad guys to learn about problems and flaws until we also offer fixes for them. That is, unless you screw up like me.

It took me a few minutes until I paused my work I was doing at the moment and actually read the email, but once I did I acted immediately and at 10:24 I had reverted the change on the web site and purged the URL from the CDN so the information was no longer publicly visible there.

The entire curl web site is however kept in a public git repository, so while the sensitive information was no longer immediately notable on the site, it was still out of the bag and there was just no taking it back. Not to mention that we don’t know how many people that already updated their git clones etc.

I pushed the particular file containing the “extra information” to the web site’s git repository at 01:26 CET the same early morning and since the web site updates itself in a cronjob every 20 minutes we know the information became available just after 01:40. At which time I had already gone to bed.

The sensitive information was displayed on the site for 8 hours and 44 minutes. The security page table showed these lines at the top:

# Vulnerability Date First Last CVE CWE
78 RTSP RTP buffer over-read February 20, 2018 7.20.0 7.58.0 CVE-2018-1000122 CWE-126: Buffer Over-read
77 LDAP NULL pointer dereference March 06, 2018 7.21.0 7.58.0 CVE-2018-1000121 CWE-476: NULL Pointer Dereference
76 FTP path trickery leads to NIL byte out of bounds write March 21, 2018 7.12.3 7.58.0 CVE-2018-1000120 CWE-122: Heap-based Buffer Overflow

I only revealed the names of the flaws and their corresponding CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) numbers, the full advisories were thankfully not exposed, the links to them were broken. (Oh, and the date column shows the dates we got the reports, not the date of the fixed release which is the intention.) We still fear that the names alone plus the CWE descriptions might be enough for intelligent attackers to figure out the rest.

As a direct result of me having revealed information about these three security vulnerabilities, we decided to change the release date of the pending release curl 7.59.0 to happen one week sooner than previously planned. To reduce the time bad actors would be able to abuse this information for malicious purposes.

How exactly did it happen?

When approaching a release day, I always create local git branches  called next-release in both the source and the web site git repositories. In the web site’s next-release branch I add the security advisories we’re working on and I add/update meta-data about these vulnerabilities etc. I prepare things in that branch that should go public on the release moment.

We’ve added CWE numbers to our vulnerabilities for the first time (we are now required to provide them when we ask for CVEs). Figuring out these numbers for the new issues made me think that I should also go back and add relevant CWE numbers to our old vulnerabilities as well and I started to go back to old issues and one by one dig up which numbers to use.

After having worked on that for a while, for some of the issues it is really tricky to figure out which CWE to use, I realized the time was rather late.

– I better get to bed and get some sleep so that I can get some work done tomorrow as well.

Then I realized I had been editing the old advisory documents while still being in the checked out next-release branch. Oops, that was a mistake. I thus wanted to check out the master branch again to push the update from there. git then pointed out that the vuln.pm file couldn’t get moved over because of reasons. (I forget the exact message but it it happened because I had already committed changes to the file in the new branch that weren’t present in the master branch.)

So, as I wanted to get to bed and not fight my tools, I saved the current (edited) file in a different name, checked out the old file version from git again, changed branch and moved the renamed file back to vuln.pm again (without a single thought that this file now contained three lines too many that should only be present in the next-release branch), committed all the edited files and pushed them all to the remote git repository… boom.

You’d think I would…

  1. know how to use git correctly
  2. know how to push what to public repos
  3. not try to do things like this at 01:26 in the morning

curl 7.59.0 and these mentioned security vulnerabilities were made public this morning.