some commands, like search, can specify any number of literals, of arbitrary
size. we already limited individual literals to 100kb. but you could specify
many of them, causing unbounded memory consumption. this change adds a limit of
1000 literals in a command, and a limit of 1mb of total combined memory for
literals. once the limits are exceeded, a TOOBIG error code is returned.
unbounded memory use could only be triggered on authenticated connections.
this addresses the same issue as CVE-2024-34055 for cyrus-imap, by damian
poddebniak.
to get the security benefits (detecting mitm attempts), explicitly configure
clients to use a scram plus variant, e.g. scram-sha-256-plus. unfortunately,
not many clients support it yet.
imapserver scram plus support seems to work with the latest imtest (imap test
client) from cyrus-sasl. no success yet with mutt (with gsasl) though.