What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-16944

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 63.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2017-11-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-835

Description

The receive_msg function in receive.c in the SMTP daemon in Exim 4.88 and 4.89 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop and stack exhaustion) via vectors involving BDAT commands and an improper check for a '.' character signifying the end of the content, related to the bdat_getc function.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0
• Exim: 4.88, 4.89

References

• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/25/1
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/25/2
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/25/3
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2021/05/04/7
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1039873
• https://bugs.exim.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2201
• https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20171125.034842.d1d75cac.en.html
• https://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-4053
• https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/43184/
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/25/1
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/25/2
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/25/3

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