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). One can implement restrictions on headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 external actors sending emails to a victim, this is a security issue. An external attacker can send specially crafted messages that consume target system resources and cause outage. One can implement restrictions on address headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot. No publicly available exploits are known.

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. Upgrade to latest released version. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 applied settings can lead to an unintended security configuration and can permit privilege escalation in certain configurations. The documentation does not advise against the use of passdb definitions that have the same driver and args settings. One such configuration would be where an administrator wishes to use the same PAM configuration or passwd file for both normal and master users but use the username_filter setting to restrict which of the users is able to be a master user.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.