CVE-2023-23916: High severity ibm cloud pak for business automation vulnerability

cURL libcurl is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by a flaw in the decompression chain implementation. By sending a specially-crafted request, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause memory errors, and results in a denial of service condition.

— IBM

curl supports "chained" HTTP compression algorithms, meaning that a server response can be compressed multiple times and potentially with different algorithms. The number of acceptable "links" in this "decompression chain" was capped, but the cap was implemented on a per-header basis allowing a malicious server to insert a virtually unlimited number of compression steps simply by using many headers. The use of such a decompression chain could result in a "malloc bomb", making curl end up spending enormous amounts of allocated heap memory, or trying to and returning out of memory errors.

— Red Hat