Bug 2305910 (CVE-2024-23185) - CVE-2024-23185 dovecot: very large headers can cause resource exhaustion when parsing message
Summary: CVE-2024-23185 dovecot: very large headers can cause resource exhaustion when...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2024-23185
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 2305915 2305914 2305916 2305917 2305918
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2024-08-19 20:47 UTC by Robb Gatica
Modified: 2024-09-24 02:48 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Red Hat Product Errata RHSA-2024:6465 0 None None None 2024-09-09 01:29:10 UTC
Red Hat Product Errata RHSA-2024:6529 0 None None None 2024-09-10 11:38:55 UTC
Red Hat Product Errata RHSA-2024:6973 0 None None None 2024-09-24 02:48:46 UTC

Description Robb Gatica 2024-08-19 20:47:40 UTC
Vulnerability Details:
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).

Workaround:
One can implement restrictions on headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot.

Fix:
Install non-vulnerable version of Dovecot. Patch can be found at https://github.com/dovecot/core/compare/f020e13%5E...ce88c33.patch

Comment 2 errata-xmlrpc 2024-09-09 01:29:09 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 Extended Update Support

Via RHSA-2024:6465 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:6465

Comment 3 errata-xmlrpc 2024-09-10 11:38:54 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Via RHSA-2024:6529 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:6529

Comment 4 errata-xmlrpc 2024-09-24 02:48:45 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Via RHSA-2024:6973 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:6973


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