CVE-2013-6171

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.8 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2013-12-09 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-287

Description

checkpassword-reply in Dovecot before 2.2.7 performs setuid operations to a user who is authenticating, which allows local users to bypass authentication and access virtual email accounts by attaching to the process and using a restricted file descriptor to modify account information in the response to the dovecot-auth server.

Affected products

dovecot: through 2.2.6; 2.0-beta1, 2.0.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, 2.0.4 (+44)

References

http://cpanel.net/tsr-2013-0010-full-disclosure/
http://secunia.com/advisories/54808
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/AuthDatabase/CheckPassword#Security
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2013-November/000264.html
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3556-2/
http://cpanel.net/tsr-2013-0010-full-disclosure/
http://secunia.com/advisories/54808
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/AuthDatabase/CheckPassword#Security
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2013-November/000264.html
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3556-2/

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