CVE-2021-40110 Apache James IMAP vulnerable to a ReDoS

What is CVE-2021-40110?

CVE-2021-40110 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache James, published on 4 Jan 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In Apache James, using Jazzer fuzzer, we identified that an IMAP user can craft IMAP LIST commands to orchestrate a Denial Of Service using a vulnerable Regular expression. This affected Apache James prior to 3.6.1 We recommend upgrading to Apache James 3.6.1 or higher , which enforce the use of RE2J regular expression engine to execute regex in linear time without back-tracking.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-40110?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.james:james-server. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache James.

How do I fix CVE-2021-40110?

Upgrade org.apache.james:james-server to 3.6.1 or later.

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-2021-40110 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-40110 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache James

• CVE-2023-51518 Apache James server: Privilege escalation via JMX pre-authentication deserialisation Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-0228 Vulnerability that affects org.apache.pdfbox:pdfbox Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-40525 Sieve file storage vulnerable to path traversal attacks Critical 9.1
• CVE-2023-26269 Apache James server: Privilege escalation through unauthenticated JMX High 7.8
• CVE-2006-2806 Denial of service in n/a High 7.8

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-r58x-wjg8-63m9.