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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Severity HIGH security problem to be announced with curl 8.4.0 on Oct 11 (CVE-2023-38545) · curl/curl · Discussion #12026 (github.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://biglemmowski.win/post/224873

Posted on twitter by Curl author Daniel Stenberg - https://nitter.cz/bagder/status/1709103920914526525

We are cutting the release cycle short and will release curl 8.4.0 on October 11, including a fix for a severity HIGH CVE. Buckle up.

... But this time actually the worst security problem found in curl in a long time

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2023-38545

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago

Reading the blog post, it's a lot more nuanced than that: someone reported a CVE, which was related to a possible int overflow in client code handling the timeout between requests. NVD chose to grade this as a 9.8/10 on their severity scale (for context, CVE-2014-0160, also known as Heartbleed, got a 7.5/10), which is ludicrous for a bug which could at most change the retry timeout of your request from your intended years to a few seconds. Daniel says that this is not a security vulnerability at all and has no business being listed on the CVE database, whereas NVD argues that it's a bug, it's been reported to them and because overflows are undefined behavior, anything can happen and so it's a security vulnerability.

In the end, they agreed to at least adjust the severity down to a 3.3, but I can understand that Daniel is still somewhat miffed about it. Personally I also agree that it's not really a security issue and that even a 3.3 is too high in terms of severity.