CVE-2023-23916: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 6.5. EPSS: 1.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

An allocation of resources without limits or throttling vulnerability exists in curl <v7.88.0 based on the "chained" HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a server response can be compressed multiple times and potentially with differentalgorithms. The number of acceptable "links" in this "decompression chain" wascapped, but the cap was implemented on a per-header basis allowing a maliciousserver to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps simply byusing many headers. The use of such a decompression chain could result in a "malloc bomb", making curl end up spending enormous amounts of allocated heap memory, or trying to and returning out of memory errors.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 10.0 only; version 11.0 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 36 only
• Haxx Curl: from 7.57.0, before 7.88.0 (fixed in 7.88.0)
• Netapp Clustered Data Ontap: affected versions not specified
• Netapp h300s Firmware: affected versions not specified
• Netapp h410s Firmware: affected versions not specified
• Netapp h500s Firmware: affected versions not specified
• Netapp h700s Firmware: affected versions not specified
• Splunk Universal Forwarder: from 8.2.0, before 8.2.12 (fixed in 8.2.12); from 9.0.0, before 9.0.6 (fixed in 9.0.6); version 9.1.0 only

Published 2023-02-23. Last modified 2026-06-17.