Medium severity · published Mar 11, 2026
CVE-2026-1965
bad reuse of HTTP Negotiate connection
6.5
CVSS
0.3%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
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 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).
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.3% · higher than 18% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
CU
curl · curl
7.10.6 before 8.14.2; 8.15.0 before 8.16.1; 8.17.0 before 8.19.0; e56ae1426cb7a0a4a427cf8d6099a821fdaae428 before f1a39f221d57354990e3eeeddc3404aede2aff70; 8.18.0; 8.17.0; +34 more · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-1965
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-1965
Patch
https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2026-1965.html
Vendor Advisory
https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2026-1965.json
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