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GHSA-9j88-vvj5-vhgr: MailKit has STARTTLS Response Injection via unflushed stream buffer that enables SASL mechanism downgrade

April 18, 2026

A STARTTLS Response Injection vulnerability in MailKit 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. This is the same vulnerability class as CVE-2021-23993 (Thunderbird), CVE-2021-33515 (Dovecot), and CVE-2011-0411 (Postfix).

References

  • github.com/advisories/GHSA-9j88-vvj5-vhgr
  • github.com/jstedfast/MailKit
  • github.com/jstedfast/MailKit/security/advisories/GHSA-9j88-vvj5-vhgr

Code Behaviors & Features

Detect and mitigate GHSA-9j88-vvj5-vhgr with GitLab Dependency Scanning

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Affected versions

All versions before 4.16.0

Fixed versions

  • 4.16.0

Solution

Upgrade to version 4.16.0 or above.

Impact 6.5 MEDIUM

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

Learn more about CVSS

Weakness

  • CWE-74: Improper Neutralization of Special Elements in Output Used by a Downstream Component ('Injection')

Source file

nuget/MailKit/GHSA-9j88-vvj5-vhgr.yml

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