NetSight
medium5.0

CVE-2024-23184

Having a large number of address headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc, etc.) becomes excessively CPU intensive.

Impact

Having a large number of address headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc, etc.) becomes excessively CPU intensive. With 100k header lines CPU usage is already 12 seconds, and in a production environment we observed 500k header lines taking 18 minutes to parse. Since this can be triggered by external actors sending emails to a victim, this is a security issue. An external attacker can send specially crafted messages that consume target system resources and cause outage. One can implement restrictions on address headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot. No publicly available exploits are known.

Affected packages

This record carries no package version data, so it cannot be matched against a dependency list automatically. Read the advisory and compare your version by hand.

Weakness classification

References