CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-27938 — Postal is an open source SMTP server

Medium CVSS 5.3

Postal is an open source SMTP server. Postal versions less than 3.0.0 are vulnerable to SMTP Smuggling attacks which may allow incoming e-mails to be spoofed. This, in conjunction with a cooperative outgoing SMTP service, would allow for an incoming e-mail to be received by Postal addressed from a server that a user has 'authorised' to send mail on their behalf but were not the genuine author of the e-mail. Postal is not affected for sending outgoing e-mails as email is re-encoded with `<CR><LF>` line endings when transmitted over SMTP. This issue has been addressed and users should upgrade to Postal v3.0.0 or higher. Once upgraded, Postal will only accept End of DATA sequences which are explicitly `<CR><LF>.<CR><LF>`. If a non-compliant sequence is detected it will be logged to the SMTP server log. There are no workarounds for this issue.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-116

Affected products

  • postalserver / postal

Matched remediation archetype

General vulnerability remediation

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Confirm the affected component, deployment paths, reachable interfaces, and enabled features from inventories and configuration, without probing production destructively.
  • Compare the advisory's affected conditions with the repository lockfiles, build manifests, artifacts, and runtime inventory.
  • Identify data sensitivity, trust boundaries, and privilege level for every confirmed affected deployment.

Remediate safely

  • Apply a vendor-supported fix or remove the affected component or feature; record the selected change and its source in the repository.
  • Update direct and transitive dependency locks, generated artifacts, deployment manifests, and asset inventories together.
  • Add a regression test for the documented unsafe condition using inert inputs and preserve rollback instructions.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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