CVE-2008-1277 in Mailenable Enterprise
Summary
by MITRE
The IMAP service (MEIMAPS.exe) in MailEnable Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition 3.13 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via (1) SEARCH and (2) APPEND commands without required arguments, which triggers a NULL pointer dereference.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 11/03/2017
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2008-1277 affects the IMAP service component known as MEIMAPS.exe within MailEnable Professional and Enterprise Edition versions 3.13 and earlier. This represents a critical security flaw that enables remote attackers to execute a denial of service attack against affected systems. The vulnerability specifically manifests when the IMAP service processes SEARCH and APPEND commands that lack required arguments, creating a condition that leads to system instability and potential service disruption.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability stems from inadequate input validation within the IMAP service implementation. When legitimate SEARCH and APPEND commands are submitted without their mandatory parameters, the software fails to properly handle these malformed requests. Instead of gracefully rejecting the invalid commands or providing appropriate error responses, the system attempts to process these requests through code paths that reference uninitialized or null pointers. This NULL pointer dereference condition occurs because the application does not validate whether required arguments are present before attempting to access or manipulate data structures associated with these commands.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple service disruption as it can be exploited by remote attackers without requiring authentication or privileged access. An attacker can simply connect to the IMAP service and submit malformed SEARCH or APPEND commands to trigger the NULL pointer dereference, causing the MEIMAPS.exe process to crash and terminate unexpectedly. This results in immediate denial of service for legitimate users who rely on the IMAP service for email access, potentially disrupting business communications and email availability. The vulnerability affects the availability aspect of the CIA triad and represents a classic example of a crash vulnerability that can be leveraged for service disruption attacks.
This vulnerability maps directly to CWE-476 which describes NULL pointer dereference conditions in software implementations. The attack pattern aligns with techniques described in the MITRE ATT&CK framework under the T1499 category for network denial of service, where adversaries leverage software flaws to disrupt service availability. The vulnerability demonstrates poor defensive programming practices where input validation is insufficient to handle malformed requests gracefully. Organizations running affected MailEnable versions should prioritize immediate remediation through official patches provided by the vendor, as the vulnerability creates an easily exploitable condition that does not require advanced technical skills to execute. Additionally, network segmentation and access controls should be implemented to limit exposure of the IMAP service to untrusted networks, while monitoring should be enabled to detect potential exploitation attempts.