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VulnerabilityPublished Updated

CVE-2024-23184: Having a large number of address headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc, etc.) becomes excessively CPU intensive

Source GCVE Database

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Authoritative record:CVE-2024-23184· Medium 5.0

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 5.0 Medium.

Data as of 3 Nov 2026, 17:14 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score
5.0Medium
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

Thin evidence

One scorer or none
CVSS scores by source
CNA (OX)CVSS 3.15.0
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 10 Sep 2024

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 3 Nov 2026.

Description

Having a large number of address headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc, etc.) becomes excessively CPU intensive. With 100k header lines CPU usage is already 12 seconds, and in a production environment we observed 500k header lines taking 18 minutes to parse. Since this can be triggered by external actors sending emails to a victim, this is a security issue. An external attacker can send specially crafted messages that consume target system resources and cause outage. One can implement restrictions on address headers on MTA component preceding Dovecot. No publicly available exploits are known.

References

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