1.30. curl

Updated curl packages that fix one security issue, various bugs, and add enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

cURL is a tool for getting files from FTP, HTTP, Gopher, Telnet, and DICT servers, using any of the supported protocols. cURL is designed to work without user interaction or any kind of interactivity.

Wesley Miaw discovered that when deflate compression was used, libcurl could call the registered write callback function with data exceeding the documented limit. A malicious server could use this flaw to crash an application using libcurl or, potentially, execute arbitrary code. Note: This issue only affected applications using libcurl that rely on the documented data size limit, and that copy the data to the insufficiently sized buffer. (CVE-2010-0734)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* when using curl to upload a file, if the connection was broken or reset by the server during the transfer, curl immediately started using 100% CPU and failed to acknowledge that the transfer had failed. With this update, curl displays an appropriate error message and exits when an upload fails mid-transfer due to a broken or reset connection. (BZ#479967)

* libcurl experienced a segmentation fault when attempting to reuse a connection after performing GSS-negotiate authentication, which in turn caused the curl program to crash. This update fixes this bug so that reused connections are able to be successfully established even after GSS-negotiate authentication has been performed. (BZ#517199)

As well, this update adds the following enhancements:

* curl now supports loading Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) from a Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) file. When curl attempts to access sites that have had their certificate revoked in a CRL, curl refuses access to those sites. (BZ#532069)

* the curl(1) manual page has been updated to clarify that the "--socks4" and "--socks5" options do not work with the IPv6, FTPS, or LDAP protocols. (BZ#473128)

* the curl utility's program help, which is accessed by running "curl -h", has been updated with descriptions for the "--ftp-account" and "--ftp-alternative-to-user" options. (BZ#517084)

Users of curl should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues and add these enhancements. All running applications using libcurl must be restarted for the update to take effect.