Dovecot (software)

In Dovecot before 2.2.36.4 and 2.3.x before 2.3.7.2 (and Pigeonhole before 0.5.7.2), protocol processing can fail for quoted strings. This occurs because '\0' characters are mishandled, and can lead to out-of-bounds writes and remote code execution.

An attacker that has valid credentials can use a Sieve script with the editheader extension to trigger a use-after-free in the mail editing code, and to write memory contents beyond the intended buffer into the delivered mail. This causes memory leak and opportunity to do memory…

An issue was discovered in the auth component in Dovecot 2.2 and 2.3 before 2.3.20. When two passdb configuration entries exist with the same driver and args settings, incorrect username_filter and mechanism settings can be applied to passdb definitions. These incorrectly…

lib-smtp in submission-login and lmtp in Dovecot 2.3.9 before 2.3.9.3 mishandles truncated UTF-8 data in command parameters, as demonstrated by the unauthenticated triggering of a submission-login infinite loop.

In Dovecot before 2.2.36.3 and 2.3.x before 2.3.5.1, a local attacker can cause a buffer overflow in the indexer-worker process, which can be used to elevate to root. This occurs because of missing checks in the fts and pop3-uidl components.

It was discovered that Dovecot before versions 2.2.36.1 and 2.3.4.1 incorrectly handled client certificates. A remote attacker in possession of a valid certificate with an empty username field could possibly use this issue to impersonate other users.

An unauthenticated attacker can send an IMAP ID command with a very large number of parameters before logging in, which causes memory and CPU usage to grow disproportionately. The login process can be terminated by the out-of-memory handling, which also terminates all other…

An unauthenticated attacker can crash the ManageSieve login process by sending a small malformed command before authenticating. If running in high-security mode (default for community releases), only the attacker's own connection is terminated. If running in high-performance…

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…

Dovecot before 2.3.15 allows ../ Path Traversal. An attacker with access to the local filesystem can trick OAuth2 authentication into using an HS256 validation key from an attacker-controlled location. This occurs during use of local JWT validation with the posix fs driver.

Dovecot before 2.3.13 has Improper Input Validation in lda, lmtp, and imap, leading to an application crash via a crafted email message with certain choices for ten thousand MIME parts.

In Dovecot before 2.3.11.3, sending a specially formatted RPA request will crash the auth service because a length of zero is mishandled.

In Dovecot before 2.3.11.3, sending a specially formatted NTLM request will crash the auth service because of an out-of-bounds read.

In Dovecot before 2.3.11.3, uncontrolled recursion in submission, lmtp, and lda allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (resource consumption) via a crafted e-mail message with deeply nested MIME parts.

In Dovecot before 2.3.10.1, unauthenticated sending of malformed parameters to a NOOP command causes a NULL Pointer Dereference and crash in submission-login, submission, or lmtp.

In the IMAP Server in Dovecot 2.3.3 through 2.3.5.2, the submission-login service crashes when the client disconnects prematurely during the AUTH command.

In the IMAP Server in Dovecot 2.3.3 through 2.3.5.2, the submission-login component crashes if AUTH PLAIN is attempted over a TLS secured channel with an unacceptable authentication message.

The JSON encoder in Dovecot before 2.3.5.2 allows attackers to repeatedly crash the authentication service by attempting to authenticate with an invalid UTF-8 sequence as the username.

A flaw was found in dovecot 2.0 up to 2.2.33 and 2.3.0. An abort of SASL authentication results in a memory leak in dovecot's auth client used by login processes. The leak has impact in high performance configuration where same login processes are reused and can cause the…

The ACL plugin in Dovecot before 1.1.4 treats negative access rights as if they are positive access rights, which allows attackers to bypass intended access restrictions.

An attacker that holds a token intended for a different purpose can authenticate, because when an OAuth2 token response does not contain a scope claim, the audience claim is used in its place and checked against the configured required scopes. These are different concepts, and…

When safe filter is used with variable expansion, all following pipelines on the same string are incorrectly interpreted as safe too, enabling unsafe data to be unescaped. This can enable SQL / LDAP injection attacks when used in authentication. Avoid using safe filter until on…

Attacker can use a specially crafted base64 exchange between Dovecot and Client to fake SCRAM TLS channel binding. This requires that the attacker is able to position itself between Dovecot and the client connection. If successful, the attacker can eavesdrop communications…

An issue was discovered in Dovecot before 2.3.13. By using IMAP IDLE, an authenticated attacker can trigger unhibernation via attacker-controlled parameters, leading to access to other users' email messages (and path disclosure).

Dovecot SQL based authentication can be bypassed when auth_username_chars is cleared by admin. This vulnerability allows bypassing authentication for any user and user enumeration. Do not clear auth_username_chars. If this is not possible, install latest fixed version. No…

Attacker can send a specifically crafted message before authentication that causes managesieve to allocate large amount of memory. Attacker can force managesieve-login to be unavailable by repeatedly crashing the process. Protect access to managesieve protocol, or install…

ManageSieve AUTHENTICATE command crashes when using literal as SASL initial response. This can be used to crash ManageSieve service repeatedly, making it unavailable for other users. Control access to ManageSieve port, or disable the service if it's not needed. Alternatively…

The auth component in Dovecot before 2.2.27, when auth-policy is configured, allows a remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) by aborting authentication without setting a username.

Doveadm credentials are verified using direct comparison which is susceptible to timing oracle attack. An attacker can use this to determine the configured credentials. Figuring out the credential will lead into full access to the affected component. Limit access to the doveadm…

A specially crafted email delivered over SMTP and passed on to Dovecot by MTA can trigger an out of bounds read resulting in potential sensitive information disclosure and denial of service. In order to trigger this vulnerability, an attacker needs to send a specially crafted…

A denial of service flaw was found in dovecot before 2.2.34. An attacker able to generate random SNI server names could exploit TLS SNI configuration lookups, leading to excessive memory usage and the process to restart.

An unauthenticated attacker can send a truncated quoted argument to the ManageSieve login process, which makes it spin in an infinite loop consuming CPU. This can cause degradation or denial of service for Sieve script management, and repeated connections can consume all…

An attacker that can get Dovecot to relay a message, for example through Sieve redirect or submission relay, can use a crafted line ending in the message body to bypass the outbound protection that prevents message content from being interpreted as SMTP commands. A downstream…

Dovecot OTP authentication is vulnerable to replay attack under specific conditions. If auth cache is enabled, and username is altered in passdb, then OTP credentials can be cached so that same OTP reply is valid. An attacker able to observe an OTP exchange is able to log in as…

Dovecot 1.2.x before 1.2.8 sets 0777 permissions during creation of certain directories at installation time, which allows local users to access arbitrary user accounts by replacing the auth socket, related to the parent directories of the base_dir directory, and possibly the…

In Dovecot before 2.3.10.1, remote unauthenticated attackers can crash the lmtp or submission process by sending mail with an empty localpart.

In Dovecot before 2.3.10.1, a crafted SMTP/LMTP message triggers an unauthenticated use-after-free bug in submission-login, submission, or lmtp, and can lead to a crash under circumstances involving many newlines after a command.

The IMAP and LMTP components in Dovecot 2.3.9 before 2.3.9.3 mishandle snippet generation when many characters must be read to compute the snippet and a trailing > character exists. This causes a denial of service in which the recipient cannot read all of their messages.

In Dovecot before 2.3.9.2, an attacker can crash a push-notification driver with a crafted email when push notifications are used, because of a NULL Pointer Dereference. The email must use a group address as either the sender or the recipient.

Attacker can upload a malicious Sieve script over ManageSieve service (or locally) to bypass configured CPU time limits for Sieve up to 130 times of the configured limit. Attacker can use this to degrade server performance and bypass configured CPU time limits for Sieve scripts.…

Dovecot accepts dot LF DOT LF symbol as end of DATA command. RFC requires that it should always be CR LF DOT CR LF. This causes Dovecot to convert single mail with LF DOT LF in middle, into two emails when relaying to SMTP. Dovecot will split mail with LF DOT LF into two mails.…

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…

The ssl-proxy-openssl.c function in Dovecot before 2.2.17, when SSLv3 is disabled, allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (login process crash) via vectors related to handshake failures.

The submission service in Dovecot before 2.3.15 allows STARTTLS command injection in lib-smtp. Sensitive information can be redirected to an attacker-controlled address.

Forwarding information received from a host listed as a trusted proxy is not kept separate from Dovecot's own authentication fields, so a value sent by that host can be injected as an internal authentication field. Any host permitted to act as a trusted proxy can authenticate as…

An attacker can cause uncontrolled memory usage with excessive bracing over IMAP. The fix in CVE-2026-27857 was incomplete, only blocking one way of doing this, so there was still another way left open. In particular, the fix was for closing braces, but you could still use open…

The Sieve engine in Dovecot before 2.3.15 allows Uncontrolled Resource Consumption, as demonstrated by a situation with a complex regular expression for the regex extension.

A mail message containing excessive amount of RFC 2231 MIME parameters causes LMTP to use too much CPU. A suitably formatted mail message causes mail delivery process to consume large amounts of CPU time. Use MTA capabilities to limit RFC 2231 MIME parameters in mail messages,…

When dovecot has been configured to use per-domain passwd files, and they are placed one path component above /etc, or slash has been added to allowed characters, path traversal can happen if the domain component is directory partial. This allows inadvertently reading…

When sending invalid base64 SASL data, login process is disconnected from the auth server, causing all active authentication sessions to fail. Invalid BASE64 data can be used to DoS a vulnerable server to break concurrent logins. Install fixed version or disable concurrency in…