Vulnerability record · CVE-2016-8622 · published 31 July 2018
CVE-2016-8622: Haxx libcurl heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability
Haxx · Libcurl
The URL percent-encoding decode function in libcurl before 7.51.0 is called `curl_easy_unescape`. Internally, even if this function would be made to allocate a unscape destination buffer larger than 2GB, it would return that new length in a signed 32 bit integer variable, thus the length would get either just truncated or both truncated and turned negative. That could then lead to libcurl writing outside of its heap based buffer.
Description
The URL percent-encoding decode function in libcurl before 7.51.0 is called `curl_easy_unescape`. Internally, even if this function would be made to allocate a unscape destination buffer larger than 2GB, it would return that new length in a signed 32 bit integer variable, thus the length would get either just truncated or both truncated and turned negative. That could then lead to libcurl writing outside of its heap based buffer.
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
1 vulnerable configurations from NVD's CPE data, grouped by vendor and product.
References
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Related vulnerabilities
Same products first, then exploited flaws of the same weakness class.
Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database (record CVE-2016-8622), CISA KEV, FIRST EPSS (scores of 2026-09-27). This page is refreshed as NVD updates the record.
