CVE-2026-5545

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...

How to fix CVE-2026-5545

To remediate CVE-2026-5545, upgrade the affected package to a fixed version below.

• —upgrade to 8.20.0-r0 or later
• —no fix listed

Is CVE-2026-5545 being exploited?

Low — EPSS is 0.0%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.

Affected packages (2)

• from 0, < 8.20.0-r0
• from 0

CVSS scores

References (2)

• ADVISORYsecurity.alpinelinux.org/vuln/CVE-2026-5545
• ADVISORYsecurity-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-5545