Last updated 25 August 2025

A buffer overflow flaw was discovered in the libproxy's url::getpac() used to download proxy.pac proxy auto-configuration file. A malicious host hosting proxy.pac, or a man in the middle attacker, could use this flaw to trigger a stack-based buffer overflow in an application using libproxy, if proxy configuration instructed it to download proxy.pac file from a remote HTTP server.

url::getpac() uses a fixed size buffer buffer[] to store content of the proxy.pac file downloaded from a remote server. When filling the buffer, it uses server-supplied content length value, rather than size buffer, as a limit for the size of the input copied into the buffer. Overflow occurs when server provides sufficiently large file and does not use chunked content encoding. The buffer size is checked when using chunked encoding.

http://code.google.com/p/libproxy/source/browse/trunk/libproxy/url.cpp?r=846#462

This issue was introduced upstream with the addition of the chunked encoding support, which first appears in version 0.4.

http://code.google.com/p/libproxy/source/detail?r=489 http://code.google.com/p/libproxy/issues/detail?id=77