CVE-2018-5161 Denial of service in Thunderbird

What is CVE-2018-5161?

CVE-2018-5161 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 11 Jun 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Crafted message headers can cause a Thunderbird process to hang on receiving the message. This vulnerability affects Thunderbird ESR < 52.8 and Thunderbird < 52.8.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-5161?

It affects 10 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Thunderbird Esr, Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Redhat Enterprise Linux Server and 4 more.

How do I fix CVE-2018-5161?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2018-5161 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-5161 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-5161, GHSA-84hm-54h2-wr3c, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-5161.