RHSA-2014:0790 — Security Advisory

Updated dovecot packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Dovecot is an IMAP server, written with security primarily in mind, for Linux and other UNIX-like systems. It also contains a small POP3 server. It supports mail in both the maildir or mbox format. The SQL drivers and authentication plug-ins are provided as subpackages.

It was discovered that Dovecot did not properly discard connections trapped in the SSL/TLS handshake phase. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause a denial of service on an IMAP/POP3 server by exhausting the pool of available connections and preventing further, legitimate connections to the IMAP/POP3 server to be made. (CVE-2014-3430)

All dovecot users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. After installing the updated packages, the dovecot service will be restarted automatically.