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 the audience claim does not describe what a token is allowed to do. A token that grants no relevant permissions can be accepted because its intended recipient value happens to match a configured scope name, granting access that should have been denied. It also hides an identity provider misconfiguration where scopes are not being issued at all. Ensure the identity provider issues a scope claim for all tokens used with Dovecot, and that configured scope names do not match audience values. Update to non-vulnerable version. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 any user without knowing that user's password. This affects deployments whose password database honours a field that permits authentication without a password. Deployments that do not configure trusted proxies are not affected. Restrict the list of trusted proxy networks to hosts that are fully under your control. Update to non-vulnerable version. No publicly available exploits are known.

An attacker that has valid credentials can open many connections to the imap-hibernate service and send invalid commands, which can intermittently cause an out-of-bounds read and crash the process. The crash interrupts hibernated IMAP sessions handled by the affected process, which can cause degradation of service for IMAP. Disable IMAP hibernation. Update to non-vulnerable version. No publicly available exploits are known.

Attacker can use the IMAP SETACL command to inject the anyone permission to user's dovecot-acl file even if imapaclallowanyone=no. This causes folders to be spammed to all users. The impact is limited to being able to spam folders to other users, no unexpected access is gained. Install to fixed version. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 braces to bypass the limit. Using excessive bracing, attacker can cause memory usage up to configured memory limit. Install fixed version, or configure vszlimit for imap process to low value. No publicly available exploits are known.

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. Install fixed version, or alternatively prevent direct access to Sieve scripts via ManageSieve or local access. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 between Dovecot and client as MITM proxy. Install fixed version. No publicly available exploits are known.

Last updated 2 June 2026

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, or upgrade to fixed version where the processing is limited. No publicly available exploits are known.

If authusernamechars is empty, it is possible to inject arbitrary LDAP filter to Dovecot's LDAP authentication. This leads to potentially bypassing restrictions and allows probing of LDAP structure. Do not clear out authusernamechars, or install fixed version. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 fixed version. No publicly available exploits are known.

Sending "NOOP (((...)))" command with 4000 parenthesis open+close results in ~1MB extra memory usage. Longer commands will result in client disconnection. This 1 MB can be left allocated for longer time periods by not sending the command ending LF. So attacker could connect possibly from even a single IP and create 1000 connections to allocate 1 GB of memory, which would likely result in reaching VSZ limit and killing the process and its other proxied connections. Attacker could connect possibly from even a single IP and create 1000 connections to allocate 1 GB of memory, which would likely result in reaching VSZ limit and killing the process and its other proxied connections. Install fixed version, there is no other remediation. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 http service port, install fixed version. No publicly available exploits are known.

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

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 the user. If authentication happens over unsecure connection, switch to SCRAM protocol. Alternatively ensure the communcations are secured, and if possible switch to OAUTH2 or SCRAM. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 /etc/passwd (or some other path which ends with passwd). If this file contains passwords, it can be used to authenticate wrongly, or if this is userdb, it can unexpectly make system users appear valid users. Upgrade to fixed version, or use different authentication scheme that does not rely on paths. Alternatively you can also ensure that the per-domain passwd files are in some other location, such as /etc/dovecot/auth/%d. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 upgrade to a fixed version. No publicly available exploits are known.

Dovecot has provided a script to use for attachment to text conversion. This script unsafely handles zip-style attachments. Attacker can use specially crafted OOXML documents to cause unintended files on the system to be indexed and subsequently ending up in FTS indexes. Do not use the provided script, instead, use something else like FTS tika. No publicly available exploits are known.

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 login processes (heavy perfomance penalty on large deployments). 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.

Vulnerability Details: 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 "fullvalue" buffer out of the smaller chunks. The fullvalue 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 vszlimit. 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).

Workaround: One can implement restrictions on headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot.

Fix: Install non-vulnerable version of Dovecot. Patch can be found at https://github.com/dovecot/core/compare/f020e13%5E...ce88c33.patch

Vulnerability Details: 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.

The main problem is that each header line's address is added to the end of a linked list. This is done by walking the whole linked list, which becomes more inefficient the more addresses there are.

Workaround: One can implement restrictions on address headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot.

Fix: Install non-vulnerable version of Dovecot. Patch can be found at https://github.com/dovecot/core/compare/8e4c42d%5E...1481c04.patch

Affected product: Dovecot IMAP Server Internal reference: DOV-5320 Vulnerability type: Improper Access Control (CWE-284) Vulnerable version: 2.2 Vulnerable component: submission Report confidence: Confirmed Solution status: Fixed in main Researcher credits: Julian Brook (julezman) Vendor notification: 2022-05-06 CVE reference: CVE-2022-30550 CVSS: 6.8 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N)

Vulnerability Details: When two passdb configuration entries exist in Dovecot configuration, which have the same driver and args settings, the incorrect usernamefilter 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 with certain configurations involving master user authentication.

Dovecot documentation does not advise against the use of passdb definitions which 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 usernamefilter setting to restrict which of the users is able to be a master user.

Risk: If same passwd file or PAM is used for both normal and master users, it is possible for attacker to become master user.

Workaround: Always authenticate master users from different source than regular users, e.g. using a separate passwd file. Alternatively, you can use global ACLs to ensure that only legimate master users have priviledged access.

Fix: This has been fixed in main branch. See https://github.com/dovecot/core/compare/7bad6a24%5E..a1022072.patch

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.

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 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, 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.