MailKit is a cross-platform mail client library built on top of MimeKit. A STARTTLS Response Injection vulnerability in versions prior to 4.16.0 allows a Man-in-the-Middle attacker to inject arbitrary protocol responses across the plaintext-to-TLS trust boundary, enabling SASL authentication mechanism downgrade (e.g., forcing PLAIN instead of SCRAM-SHA-256). The internal read buffer in SmtpStream, ImapStream, and Pop3Stream is not flushed when the underlying stream is replaced with SslStream during STARTTLS upgrade, causing pre-TLS attacker-injected data to be processed as trusted post-TLS responses. Version 4.16.0 patches the issue.
Exploitability
AV:NAC:LPR:NUI:RScope
S:UImpact
C:NI:HA:N6.5/CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:NInput Validation