Mutt had incorrect error handling when initially connecting to an IMAP server, which could result in an attempt to authenticate without enabling TLS. References: http://lists.mutt.org/pipermail/mutt-announce/Week-of-Mon-20201116/000031.html https://mailman.neomutt.org/pipermail/neomutt-users-neomutt.org/2020-November/000929.html Upstream patchs: https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/-/commit/04b06aaa3e0cc0022b9b01dbca2863756ebbf59a https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/commit/9c36717a3e2af1f2c1b7242035455ec8112b4b06
Created mutt tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1900827]
Statement: Red Hat Product Security has rated the severity of this flaw as Moderate because although the Confidentiality impact is high, the attack complexity is also high as a particular attacker would at least need to coordinate social engineering a victim to connect to a bad server, and also perform a man-in-the-middle attack or perform similar interception of the connection. Please see the following page for details on Red Hat severity ratings with special attention to Moderate: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification .
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Via RHSA-2021:4181 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2021:4181