CVE-2024-23185CWE-770

Very large headers can cause resource exhaustion when parsing message

High · published September 10, 2024

CVSS v3.1
7.5
EPSS
1%
Percentile
70.1
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

Very large headers can cause resource exhaustion when parsing message. The message-parser normally reads reasonably sized chunks of the message. However, when it feeds them to message-header-parser, it starts building up "full_value" buffer out of the smaller chunks. The full_value buffer has no size limit, so large headers can cause large memory usage. It doesn't matter whether it's a single long header line, or a single header split into multiple lines. This bug exists in all Dovecot versions. Incoming mails typically have some size limits set by MTA, so even largest possible header size may still fit into Dovecot's vsz_limit. So attackers probably can't DoS a victim user this way. A user could APPEND larger mails though, allowing them to DoS themselves (although maybe cause some memory issues for the backend in general). One can implement restrictions on headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot. No publicly available exploits are known.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
7.5 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.01295 · 70.1th percentile
Weakness
CWE-770 · Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Published
2024-09-10T14:38Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 10 SEP 14:38Z
    Very large headers can cause resource exhaustion when parsing message
    cvelistv5