The curl tool's "globbing" feature allows a user to specify a numerical range
through which curl iterates. It is typically specified as [1-5]
, specifying
the first and the last numbers in the range. Or with [a-z]
, using letters.
The curl code for parsing the second unsigned number did not check for a
leading minus character, which allowed a user to specify [1--1]
with no
complaints and have the latter -1
number get turned into the largest
unsigned long value the system can handle. This would ultimately cause curl to
write outside the dedicated heap allocated buffer after no less than 100,000
iterations, since it would have room for 5 digits but not 6.
When the range is specified with letters, and the ending letter is left out
[L-]
, the code would still advance its read pointer 5 bytes even if the
string was just 4 bytes and end up reading outside the given buffer.
This flaw exists only in the curl tool, not in the libcurl library.