The vendor explicitly identifies these products as affected by this CVE.
- dovecot as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- dovecot-devel as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- dovecot-mysql as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- dovecot-pgsql as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- dovecot-pigeonhole as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- dovecot.src as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
- dovecot as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- dovecot-devel as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- dovecot-mysql as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- dovecot-pgsql as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- dovecot-pigeonhole as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- dovecot.src as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- Summary
- A flaw was found in dovecot. A remote attacker with valid credentials can exploit this vulnerability by selecting a compression algorithm for the IMAP connection that requires a large amount of memory for decompression. By opening several such connections, the attacker can exhaust the process's memory limit, leading to the termination of the process and all its connections. This can cause degradation or a complete denial of service for IMAP.
- Remediation
- To mitigate this vulnerability, disable IMAP compression in the Dovecot configuration. This can be achieved by ensuring that `zlib` or other compression plugins are not loaded for IMAP services. For example, remove `zlib` from the `mail_plugins` setting in `dovecot.conf` or a relevant configuration file. A restart of the Dovecot service is required for the changes to take effect. Disabling compression may result in increased network bandwidth usage for IMAP connections.
