CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-42391

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.38%

30th percentile - higher than 30% of all known CVEs

Summary

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 connections handled by the same process. This can cause degradation or denial of service for IMAP logins. Limit the number of connections handled by a single imap-login process. This has a performance impact though. Update to non-vulnerable version. No publicly available exploits are known.

Risk Assessment

The risk includes denial of service for IMAP logins, potentially disrupting email access for users.

Recommendation

Update Dovecot to a non-vulnerable version and consider limiting the number of connections per imap-login process.

Other vulnerabilities in Dovecot

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

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 connections handled by the same process. This can cause degradation or denial of service for IMAP logins. Limit the number of connections handled by a single imap-login process. This has a performance impact though. Update to non-vulnerable version. No publicly available exploits are known.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS