Mailpit is an email testing tool and API for developers. Prior to version 1.28.2, the Mailpit WebSocket server is configured to accept connections from any origin. This lack of Origin header validation introduces a Cross-Site WebSocket Hijacking (CSWSH) vulnerability. An attacker can host a malicious website that, when visited by a developer running Mailpit locally, establishes a WebSocket connection to the victims Mailpit instance (default ws://localhost:8025). This allows the attacker to intercept sensitive data such as email contents, headers, and server statistics in real-time. This issue has been patched in version 1.28.2.
The product uses a WebSocket, but it does not properly verify that the source of data or communication is valid.
WebSockets provide a bi-directional low latency communication (near real-time) between a client and a server. WebSockets are different than HTTP in that the connections are long-lived, as the channel will remain open until the client or the server is ready to send the message, whereas in HTTP, once the response occurs (which typically happens immediately), the transaction completes. A WebSocket can leverage the existing HTTP protocol over ports 80 and 443, but it is not limited to HTTP. WebSockets can make cross-origin requests that are not restricted by browser-based protection mechanisms such as the Same Origin Policy (SOP) or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). Without explicit origin validation, this makes CSRF attacks more powerful.