CVE-2024-23184

2024-09-1015:15:14

CWE-770

web.nvd.nist.gov

address headers

cpu intensive

production environment

security issue

external actors

specially crafted messages

target system resources

outage

mta component

dovecot

exploits

cve-2024-23184

CVSS3

Attack Vector

NETWORK

Attack Complexity

LOW

Privileges Required

LOW

User Interaction

NONE

Scope

CHANGED

Confidentiality Impact

NONE

Integrity Impact

LOW

Availability Impact

NONE

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N

AI Score

6.7

Confidence

Low

EPSS

Percentile

9.6%

JSON

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.

CNA Affected

[
  {
    "defaultStatus": "unaffected",
    "modules": [
      "core"
    ],
    "product": "OX Dovecot Pro",
    "vendor": "Open-Xchange GmbH",
    "versions": [
      {
        "lessThanOrEqual": "2.3.21",
        "status": "affected",
        "version": "0",
        "versionType": "semver"
      }
    ]
  }
]