Severity by source
AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Network-reachable Sieve requires a valid account (PR:L) with no interaction and low complexity; impact is availability-only server-wide delivery halt (A:H, C:N/I:N), scope unchanged within the mail service.
Primary rating from Vendor (GitLab).
CVSS VectorVendor: GitLab
Lifecycle Timeline
2DescriptionCVE.org
Inefficient complexity in the Sieve filter evaluation of Progressive Robot hMailServer 6.2.24 through 6.3.5 allows an authenticated account holder to make the mail services unavailable with their own filter. A ':matches' pattern was matched by a backtracking descent whose time grew with the matched value's length raised to the number of wildcards, so a pattern such as '*a*a*a*b' over 800 characters took 44 seconds; and 'deleteheader' erased the fields it removed one at a time, so removing many fields of one name over a message's header cost O(N^2) (80,000 fields took 18.8 seconds). Sieve filters run on the small, shared delivery thread pool, so an account holder whose active script does this, fed a few messages they can send themselves, empties the pool and stops delivery for the whole server. The script is the account holder's own and cannot be set for another user.
AnalysisAI
Authenticated denial of service in Progressive Robot hMailServer 6.2.24 through 6.3.5 lets any account holder who can publish an active Sieve script exhaust the server's shared delivery thread pool using their own filters. A ':matches' pattern with several wildcards evaluated against a long string, or a 'deleteheader' rule that strips many same-named fields, consumes seconds of CPU per message (44 seconds for an '*a*a*a*b' pattern over 800 characters; 18.8 seconds to remove 80,000 header fields), and a handful of self-delivered messages is enough to stall mail delivery for every user on the instance. …
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Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata
Vulnerability AssessmentAI
| Exploitation | Requires a valid, authenticated hMailServer account (PR:L) on a server where user-defined Sieve filtering is enabled and active for that account. … Additional conditions and limiting factors are described in the full assessment. |
| Risk Assessment | This is a genuine but moderate-priority denial-of-service issue, not a high-impact remote code execution risk. … Full risk analysis with EPSS, KEV, and SSVC signal comparison available after sign-in. |
| Exploit Scenario | Full exploit scenario with step-by-step reproduction available after sign-in. |
| Remediation | Vendor-released patch: upgrade hMailServer to 6.3.6 or later, which addresses both the wildcard backtracking cost in ':matches' evaluation and the quadratic 'deleteheader' removal path; the fix is published at https://gitlab.com/hmailserver/hmailserver/-/releases/v6.3.6 and described in the upstream work item https://gitlab.com/hmailserver/hmailserver/-/work_items/75. … Detailed patch versions, workarounds, and compensating controls in full report. |
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External POC / Exploit Code
Leaving vuln.today
EUVD-2026-94856
GHSA-cqgg-3g6j-wqjp