CVE-2021-40111 Apache James IMAP parsing Denial Of Service

What is CVE-2021-40111?

CVE-2021-40111 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache James, published on 4 Jan 2022. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In Apache James, while fuzzing with Jazzer the IMAP parsing stack, we discover that crafted APPEND and STATUS IMAP command could be used to trigger infinite loops resulting in expensive CPU computations and OutOfMemory exceptions. This can be used for a Denial Of Service attack. The IMAP user needs to be authenticated to exploit this vulnerability. This affected Apache James prior to version 3.6.1. This vulnerability had been patched in Apache James 3.6.1 and higher. We recommend the upgrade.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-40111?

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-2021-40111?

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-2021-40111 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-40111 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-fqgw-6qj5-8hmp.