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zbateson/mail-mime-parser has uncontrolled resource consumption (CPU/memory DoS) parsing untrusted MIME

Type: advisorySource: Official CVE List1 source record

zbateson/mail-mime-parser is a mail mime parser alternative to PHP's imap* functions and Pear libraries for reading messages in Internet Message Format RFC 822. Starting in version 2.0.0 and prior to version 3.0.6 and 4.0.2, an uncontrolled resource consumption / algorithmic complexity vulnerability (CWE-400) affects any application that parses untrusted email with this library. Three independent parsing paths are super-linear in cost, so a byte-size cap on the caller side does **not** bound the work done. A crafted message under 2 MB can consume seconds of CPU or hundreds of megabytes to multiple gigabytes of memory (leading to an out-of-memory kill), enabling denial of service. The parse is lazy, but the cost is paid on the first `getAllParts()` or content read. This is fxed in 4.0.2 and 3.0.6. The fixes add configurable limits on multipart nesting depth and on header count / total header size (recording a parse error past the threshold rather than throwing), and change sibling append to O(n). Users should upgrade to one of these (or later) versions. Versions 2.x are also affected but are end-of-life and will not receive patches; users on those lines should upgrade to a fixed release. (Versions prior to 2.0 used a different parser and are not affected by all three paths.) These costs are super-linear, so an input byte-size cap alone does not bound them. Until upgrading, restrict exposure of the parser to untrusted input, and run parsing under a constrained memory_limit and

Announced Group revision 1
Original source ↗

CVE-2026-61816

Primary source · Revision 1

Imported from structured advisory data. Source references identify upstream records or fields; verify affected versions and your deployed configuration.

Security context

Source reference: cve:CVE-2026-61816

mail-mime-parser

Source reference: /containers/cna/affected/0/product

Affected versions
Not stated in this record
Fixed versions
Not stated in this record
Prerequisites
Not stated in this record

Structured affected-version data

Original package identities and version rules from this source.

[
  {
    "vendor": "zbateson",
    "product": "mail-mime-parser",
    "versions": [
      {
        "status": "affected",
        "version": ">= 2.0.0, < 3.0.6"
      },
      {
        "status": "affected",
        "version": ">= 4.0.0, < 4.0.2"
      }
    ]
  }
]
Related CVEs
CVE-2026-61816

Source reference: /cveMetadata/cveId

Publisher severity

high

Source reference: /containers/cna/metrics

Linked CVE context

These ratings describe the referenced vulnerabilities and products. They are not a severity rating for every application using this dependency.

CVE-2026-61816 · High

zbateson/mail-mime-parser, zbateson/mail-mime-parser

Event
#1839 · Revision 1
Added to Heist Feed
Publisher date
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