CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedThe zbateson/mail-mime-parser library is vulnerable to an uncontrolled resource consumption issue, allowing crafted email messages to cause significant CPU and memory usage, potentially leading to denial of service. Applications that utilize this library for parsing untrusted email, particularly those running versions 2.0.0 to 3.0.5 and 4.0.0 to 4.0.1, should prioritize upgrading to the fixed versions 3.0.6 or 4.0.2 to mitigate this risk. Until an upgrade is possible, it is recommended to limit exposure to untrusted input and enforce strict resource constraints during parsing.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD Description
zbateson/mail-mime-parser is a mail mime parser alternative to PHP's imap* functions and Pear libraries for reading messages in Internet Message Format RFC 822. Starting in version 2.0.0 and prior to version 3.0.6 and 4.0.2, an uncontrolled resource consumption / algorithmic complexity vulnerability (CWE-400) affects any application that parses untrusted email with this library. Three independent parsing paths are super-linear in cost, so a byte-size cap on the caller side does **not** bound the work done. A crafted message under 2 MB can consume seconds of CPU or hundreds of megabytes to multiple gigabytes of memory (leading to an out-of-memory kill), enabling denial of service. The parse is lazy, but the cost is paid on the first `getAllParts()` or content read. This is fxed in 4.0.2 and 3.0.6. The fixes add configurable limits on multipart nesting depth and on header count / total header size (recording a parse error past the threshold rather than throwing), and change sibling append to O(n). Users should upgrade to one of these (or later) versions. Versions 2.x are also affected but are end-of-life and will not receive patches; users on those lines should upgrade to a fixed release. (Versions prior to 2.0 used a different parser and are not affected by all three paths.) These costs are super-linear, so an input byte-size cap alone does not bound them. Until upgrading, restrict exposure of the parser to untrusted input, and run parsing under a constrained memory_limit and execution time limit so a malicious message fails its own request rather than exhausting the host.