CAPEC-183: IMAP/SMTP Command Injection

ID CAPEC-183
Typical Severity Medium
Status Draft

An adversary exploits weaknesses in input validation on web-mail servers to execute commands on the IMAP/SMTP server. Web-mail servers often sit between the Internet and the IMAP or SMTP mail server. User requests are received by the web-mail servers which then query the back-end mail server for the requested information and return this response to the user. In an IMAP/SMTP command injection attack, mail-server commands are embedded in parts of the request sent to the web-mail server. If the web-mail server fails to adequately sanitize these requests, these commands are then sent to the back-end mail server when it is queried by the web-mail server, where the commands are then executed. This attack can be especially dangerous since administrators may assume that the back-end server is protected against direct Internet access and therefore may not secure it adequately against the execution of malicious commands.

https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/183.html

Weaknesses

# ID Name Type
CWE-77 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command ('Command Injection') weakness
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