Vulnerability record · CVE-2021-22890 · published 1 April 2021
CVE-2021-22890: Haxx libcurl authentication bypass by spoofing vulnerability
Haxx · Libcurl
curl 7.63.0 to and including 7.75.0 includes vulnerability that allows a malicious HTTPS proxy to MITM a connection due to bad handling of TLS 1.3 session tickets. When using a HTTPS proxy and TLS 1.3, libcurl can confuse session tickets arriving from the HTTPS proxy but work as if they arrived from the remote server and then wrongly "short-cut" the host handshake. When confusing the tickets, a HTTPS proxy can trick libcurl to use the wrong session ticket resume for the host and thereby circumvent the server TLS certificate check and make a MITM attack to be possible to perform unnoticed. Note that such a malicious HTTPS proxy needs to provide a certificate that curl will accept for the MITMed server for an attack to work - unless curl has been told to ignore the server certificate check.
Description
curl 7.63.0 to and including 7.75.0 includes vulnerability that allows a malicious HTTPS proxy to MITM a connection due to bad handling of TLS 1.3 session tickets. When using a HTTPS proxy and TLS 1.3, libcurl can confuse session tickets arriving from the HTTPS proxy but work as if they arrived from the remote server and then wrongly "short-cut" the host handshake. When confusing the tickets, a HTTPS proxy can trick libcurl to use the wrong session ticket resume for the host and thereby circumvent the server TLS certificate check and make a MITM attack to be possible to perform unnoticed. Note that such a malicious HTTPS proxy needs to provide a certificate that curl will accept for the MITMed server for an attack to work - unless curl has been told to ignore the server certificate check.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Affected products
11 vulnerable configurations from NVD's CPE data, grouped by vendor and product.
References
Track CVE-2021-22890 inside VULONE
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Related vulnerabilities
Same products first, then exploited flaws of the same weakness class.
Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database (record CVE-2021-22890), CISA KEV, FIRST EPSS (scores of 2026-09-29). This page is refreshed as NVD updates the record.