What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2018-16890
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 5.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2019-02-06 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-125
Description
libcurl versions from 7.36.0 to before 7.64.0 is vulnerable to a heap buffer out-of-bounds read. The function handling incoming NTLM type-2 messages (`lib/vauth/ntlm.c:ntlm_decode_type2_target`) does not validate incoming data correctly and is subject to an integer overflow vulnerability. Using that overflow, a malicious or broken NTLM server could trick libcurl to accept a bad length + offset combination that would lead to a buffer read out-of-bounds.
Affected products
- Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 18.10
- Debian Linux: 9.0
- F5 BIG-IP APM: from 13.1.0 through 13.1.3; from 14.0.0 through 14.1.2; from 15.0.0 through 15.0.1
- curl: from 7.36.0 before 7.64.0 — fixed in 7.64.0
- Clustered Data ONTAP: all versions
- Oracle Corporation Communications Operations Monitor: 3.4, 4.0
- Oracle Corporation Oracle HTTP Server: 12.2.1.3.0
- Oracle Corporation Secure Global Desktop: 5.4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0
- Siemens SINEMA Remote Connect Client: through 2.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: curl 7.64.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/106947
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:3701
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-16890
- https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/pdf/ssa-436177.pdf
- https://curl.haxx.se/docs/CVE-2018-16890.html
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/8338a0f605bdbb3a6098bb76f666a95fc2b2f53f37fa1ecc89f1146f%40%3Cdevnull.infra.apache.org%3E
- https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190315-0001/
- https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K03314397?utm_source=f5support&%3Butm_medium=RSS
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3882-1/
- https://www.debian.org/security/2019/dsa-4386
- https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpuapr2019-5072813.html
- https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpujul2019-5072835.html
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