CVE-2001-0064 in MDaemon
Summary
by MITRE
Webconfig, IMAP, and other services in MDaemon 3.5.0 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via a long URL terminated by a "\r\n" string.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/10/2025
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2001-0064 represents a classic buffer overflow condition affecting MDaemon email server software version 3.5.0 and earlier. This flaw specifically impacts webconfig, imap, and other services within the MDaemon platform, creating a remote denial of service scenario that can be exploited by unauthorized attackers. The vulnerability stems from insufficient input validation mechanisms that fail to properly handle excessively long URL strings terminated by carriage return characters, leading to memory corruption and service disruption.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability demonstrates a fundamental lack of bounds checking in the MDaemon server's protocol handling routines. When the affected services receive a malformed URL containing an excessive number of characters followed by a carriage return termination, the application fails to properly validate the input length before processing. This absence of input sanitization creates a condition where the buffer allocated for URL parsing becomes overflowed, causing the application to crash or become unresponsive. The flaw operates at the application layer and can be triggered through network-based attacks without requiring authentication, making it particularly dangerous for publicly accessible email servers.
From an operational impact perspective, this vulnerability represents a significant security risk for organizations relying on MDaemon email infrastructure. The remote denial of service capability allows attackers to disrupt critical email services without requiring privileged access or specialized tools. The attack vector is straightforward and can be executed by sending a specially crafted URL to any of the vulnerable MDaemon services, potentially affecting thousands of users within an organization. The service disruption can last until the affected processes are manually restarted or the system is rebooted, creating operational downtime that may impact business continuity and communication workflows.
Security practitioners should consider this vulnerability in relation to CWE-121, which addresses stack-based buffer overflow conditions, and CWE-122, which covers heap-based buffer overflow scenarios. The ATT&CK framework categorizes this as a denial of service technique under the system service compromise tactics, where adversaries leverage application-level flaws to disrupt service availability. Organizations should implement immediate mitigations including applying the vendor-provided patches, implementing network-level access controls to restrict exposure of vulnerable services, and monitoring for suspicious traffic patterns that may indicate exploitation attempts. Additionally, network segmentation and firewall rules should be configured to limit access to MDaemon services to trusted networks only, reducing the attack surface and preventing unauthorized exploitation of this vulnerability.