CVE-2021-3181

rfc822.c in Mutt through 2.0.4 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (mailbox unavailability) by sending email messages with sequences of semicolon characters in RFC822 address fields (aka terminators of empty groups). A small email message from the attacker can cause large memory consumption, and the victim may then be unable to see email messages from other persons.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Name	Vendor	Start Version	End Version
Mutt	Mutt	*	2.0.4 (including)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8	RedHat	mutt-5:2.0.7-1.el8	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	bionic	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	devel	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	focal	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	groovy	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	precise/esm	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	trusty	*
Mutt	Ubuntu	xenial	*

Potential Mitigations

Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

NVD	https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-3181
CWE	https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/401.html

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Weakness

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References