MailKit has STARTTLS Response Injection via unflushed stream buffer that enables SASL mechanism downgrade

MailKit is a cross-platform mail client library built on top of MimeKit. A STARTTLS Response Injection vulnerability in versions prior to 4.16.0 allows a Man-in-the-Middle attacker to inject arbitrary protocol responses across the plaintext-to-TLS trust boundary, enabling SASL authentication mechanism downgrade (e.g., forcing PLAIN instead of SCRAM-SHA-256). The internal read buffer in `SmtpStream`, `ImapStream`, and `Pop3Stream` is not flushed when the underlying stream is replaced with `SslStream` during STARTTLS upgrade, causing pre-TLS attacker-injected data to be processed as trusted post-TLS responses. Version 4.16.0 patches the issue.

Source published

24 Apr 2026 03:07:24 UTC

Source modified

25 Apr 2026 01:46:35 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 3.1 · 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N