Detections
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Alpine: dovecot: security update to 2.3.21.1-r0

medium Tenable Cloud Security Plugin ID 420960

Description

There are packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities referenced in the following CVEs:

 - 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. (CVE-2024-23184)

 - 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. (CVE-2024-23185)

See Also

https://security.alpinelinux.org/vuln/CVE-2024-23184

https://security.alpinelinux.org/vuln/CVE-2024-23185

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 420960

Version: Revision 1.13

Type: Local

Published: 2/24/2025

Updated: 1/20/2026

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3

Percentile: 23.92

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4

Temporal Score: 3.1

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2024-23184

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5

Temporal Score: 4.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 8/16/2024

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2024-23184, CVE-2024-23185

IAVA: 2024-A-0504