Bug 2446448 (CVE-2026-1965) - CVE-2026-1965 curl: curl: Authentication bypass due to incorrect connection reuse with Negotiate authentication
Summary: CVE-2026-1965 curl: curl: Authentication bypass due to incorrect connection r...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2026-1965
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 2446504 2446505 2446506 2446510 2446511 2446512 2446513 2446517 2446507 2446508 2446509 2446514 2446515 2446516
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-03-11 11:01 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-03-11 12:34 UTC (History)
26 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-03-11 11:01:17 UTC
libcurl can in some circumstances reuse the wrong connection when asked to do
an Negotiate-authenticated HTTP or HTTPS request.

libcurl features a pool of recent connections so that subsequent requests can
reuse an existing connection to avoid overhead.

When reusing a connection a range of criterion must first be met. Due to a
logical error in the code, a request that was issued by an application could
wrongfully reuse an existing connection to the same server that was
authenticated using different credentials. One underlying reason being that
Negotiate sometimes authenticates *connections* and not *requests*, contrary
to how HTTP is designed to work.

An application that allows Negotiate authentication to a server (that responds
wanting Negotiate) with `user1:password1` and then does another operation to
the same server also using Negotiate but with `user2:password2` (while the
previous connection is still alive) - the second request wrongly reused the
same connection and since it then sees that the Negotiate negotiation is
already made, it just sends the request over that connection thinking it uses
the user2 credentials when it is in fact still using the connection
authenticated for user1...

The set of authentication methods to use is set with  `CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH`.

Applications can disable libcurl's reuse of connections and thus mitigate this
problem, by using one of the following libcurl options to alter how
connections are or are not reused: `CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT`,
`CURLOPT_MAXCONNECTS` and `CURLMOPT_MAX_HOST_CONNECTIONS` (if using the
curl_multi API).


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