libcurl can be told to use kerberos over FTP to a server, as set with the CURLOPT_KRBLEVEL option. During such kerberos FTP data transfer, the server sends data to curl in blocks with the 32 bit size of each block first and then that amount of data immediately following. A malicious or just broken server can claim to send a very large block and if by doing that it makes curl's subsequent call to realloc() to fail, curl would then misbehave in the exit path and double-free the memory. In practical terms, an up to 4 GB memory area may very well be fine to allocate on a modern 64 bit system but on 32 bit systems it will fail. Kerberos FTP is a rarely used protocol with curl. Also, Kerberos authentication is usually only attempted and used with servers that the client has a previous association with.
libcurl can be told to use kerberos over FTP to a server, as set with the CURLOPT_KRBLEVEL option. During such kerberos FTP data transfer, the server sends data to curl in blocks with the 32 bit size of each block first and then that amount of data immediately following. A malicious or just broken server can claim to send a very large block and if by doing that it makes curl's subsequent call to realloc() to fail, curl would then misbehave in the exit path and double-free the memory. In practical terms, an up to 4 GB memory area may very well be fine to allocate on a modern 64 bit system but on 32 bit systems it will fail. Kerberos FTP is a rarely used protocol with curl. Also, Kerberos authentication is usually only attempted and used with servers that the client has a previous association with.
https://curl.haxx.se/docs/CVE-2019-5481.html https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/0649433da53c7165f839e2
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