Bug 883060 (CVE-2012-5620)

Summary:	CVE-2012-5620 dovecot: DoS when handling a search for multiple keywords
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Vincent Danen <vdanen>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	CC:	janfrode, mhlavink
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2012-12-04 22:51:04 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	883067
Bug Blocks:	883066

Description Vincent Danen 2012-12-03 17:26:52 UTC

Dovecot 2.1.11 was released [1] and includes a fix for a crash condition when the IMAP server was issued a SEARCH command with multiple KEYWORD parameters.  An authenticated remote user could use this flaw to crash Dovecot [2].

The upstream fix [3] was to remove the keyword merging code.  This code does not exist in Dovecot 1.x, but it does affect 2.x versions, at least as far back as 2.0.9 (earliest version I checked).

So Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is not affected by this flaw, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Fedora are.

[1] http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2012-November/000235.html
[2] http://secunia.com/advisories/51455
[3] http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.1/rev/0306792cc843

Comment 1 Vincent Danen 2012-12-03 17:32:29 UTC

Created dovecot tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-all [bug 883067]

Comment 2 Vincent Danen 2012-12-04 05:37:54 UTC

This has been assigned CVE-2012-5620:

http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/12/04/4

Comment 3 Vincent Danen 2012-12-04 22:51:04 UTC

This was filed a bit prematurely.  As upstream indicates in the Debian bug report [1], a user can only crash their own session (self-DoS), which we would not consider a security flaw.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=695138#15

Statement:

Red Hat does not consider this to be a security flaw as a user executing these commands will only succeed in preventing service to the current connection, and not to the server as a whole.