CVE-2026-41319GHSA-9J88-VVJ5-VHGR
MailKit has STARTTLS Response Injection via unflushed stream buffer that enables SASL mechanism downgrade
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 4.16.0
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
CISA's decision points: whether it is exploited, whether attacks can be automated, and how much control an attacker gets. Assessed (SSVC 2.0.3).What do these mean? →
- Exploitation: poc
- Automatable: no
- Technical impact: partial
Summary
MailKit is a cross-platform mail client library built on top of MimeKit. A STARTTLS Response Injection vulnerability in versions prior to 4.16.0 allows a Man-in-the-Middle attacker to inject arbitrary protocol responses across the plaintext-to-TLS trust boundary, enabling SASL authentication mechanism downgrade (e.g., forcing PLAIN instead of SCRAM-SHA-256). The internal read buffer in `SmtpStream`, `ImapStream`, and `Pop3Stream` is not flushed when the underlying stream is replaced with `SslStream` during STARTTLS upgrade, causing pre-TLS attacker-injected data to be processed as trusted post-TLS responses. Version 4.16.0 patches the issue.
Timeline
- CVE published
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- jstedfast MailKit
fixed in 4.16.0
- MailKitNuGet
fixed in 4.16.0