Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: DoS attacks on MIME-capable software via complex MIME emails


From: "Kurt Buff" <kurt.buff () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 11:03:50 -0800

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Bernhard Brehm <bruhns () recurity-labs com> wrote:
Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu said:

You want *real* loads of fun? Go read up on message/partial ;)

<snip>
The situation is quite similiar to the reason, why MTAs like sendmail
are no real target for such attacks: No server should try to convert
8bit encoding to 7bit encoding any more. Nobody needs to split a message
into several parts for transfer and expects the mailclient to reassemble
the parts. Not all pieces of MIME-related software really need to
understand these rather obscure content-types.

Not exactly true. There might not be any clients which support it
currently (don't know, myself) but *my* users are constantly trying to
send huge messages that I don't allow for size reasons. Breaking them
apart into chunks automatically for automatic reassembly by the
recipient would very much appeal to them.

Kurt

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