CVE-2026-41319CWE-74

MailKit has STARTTLS Response Injection via unflushed stream buffer that enables SASL mechanism downgrade

Medium · published April 24, 2026

CVSS v3.1
6.5
EPSS
0%
Percentile
25.0
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

MailKit is a cross-platform mail client library built on top of MimeKit. A STARTTLS Response Injection vulnerability in versions prior to 4.16.0 allows a Man-in-the-Middle attacker to inject arbitrary protocol responses across the plaintext-to-TLS trust boundary, enabling SASL authentication mechanism downgrade (e.g., forcing PLAIN instead of SCRAM-SHA-256). The internal read buffer in `SmtpStream`, `ImapStream`, and `Pop3Stream` is not flushed when the underlying stream is replaced with `SslStream` during STARTTLS upgrade, causing pre-TLS attacker-injected data to be processed as trusted post-TLS responses. Version 4.16.0 patches the issue.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
6.5 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00331 · 25.0th percentile
Weakness
CWE-74 · Improper Neutralization of Special Elements in Output Used by a Downstream Component ('Injection')
Published
2026-04-24T03:07Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 24 APR 03:07Z
    MailKit has STARTTLS Response Injection via unflushed stream buffer that enables SASL mechanism downgrade
    cvelistv5