In Eclipse Mosquitto version from 1.0 to 1.4.15, a Null Dereference vulnerability was found in the Mosquitto library which could lead to crashes for those applications using the library.

In Eclipse Mosquitto 1.4.14, if a Mosquitto instance is set running with a configuration file, then sending a HUP signal to server triggers the configuration to be reloaded from disk. If there are lots of clients connected so that there are no more file descriptors/sockets available (default limit typically 1024 file descriptors on Linux), then opening the configuration file will fail.

In Eclipse Mosquitto version 1.0 to 1.5.5 (inclusive) when a client publishes a retained message to a topic, then has its access to that topic revoked, the retained message will still be published to clients that subscribe to that topic in the future. In some applications this may result in clients being able cause effects that would otherwise not be allowed.

When Eclipse Mosquitto version 1.0 to 1.5.5 (inclusive) is configured to use a password file for authentication, any malformed data in the password file will be treated as valid. This typically means that the malformed data becomes a username and no password. If this occurs, clients can circumvent authentication and get access to the broker by using the malformed username. In particular, a blank line will be treated as a valid empty username. Other security measures are unaffected. Users who have only used the mosquittopasswd utility to create and modify their password files are unaffected by this vulnerability.

When Eclipse Mosquitto version 1.0 to 1.5.5 (inclusive) is configured to use an ACL file, and that ACL file is empty, or contains only comments or blank lines, then Mosquitto will treat this as though no ACL file has been defined and use a default allow policy. The new behaviour is to have an empty ACL file mean that all access is denied, which is not a useful configuration but is not unexpected.