Medium severity · published May 13, 2026
CVE-2026-5545
wrong reuse of HTTP Negotiate connection
6.5
CVSS
0.4%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
libcurl might in some circumstances reuse the wrong connection when asked to
do an authenticated HTTP(S) request after a Negotiate-authenticated one, when
both use the same host.
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 criteria must 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.
An application that first uses Negotiate authentication to a server with
`user1:password1` and then does another operation to the same server asking
for any authentication method but for `user2:password2` (while the previous
connection is still alive) - the second request gets confused and wrongly
reuses the same connection and sends the new request over that connection
thinking it uses a mix of user1's and user2's credentials when it is in fact
still using the connection authenticated for user1...
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
High
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.4% · higher than 35% 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 8.20.0; e56ae1426cb7a0a4a427cf8d6099a821fdaae428 before 33e43985b8f3b9e66691d06e70be0395849856cd; 8.19.0; 8.18.0; +34 more · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-5545
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-5545
Patch
https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2026-5545.html
Vendor Advisory
https://curl.se/docs/CVE-2026-5545.json
Exploit
https://hackerone.com/reports/3642555
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