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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2008-4577 json

The ACL plugin in Dovecot before 1.1.4 treats negative access rights as if they are positive access rights, which allows attackers to bypas…

published 2008-10-15 18 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2008-4557

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.3%
EPSS 2.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 83%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The ACL plugin in Dovecot before 1.1.4 treats negative access rights as if they are positive access rights, which allows attackers to bypass intended access restrictions.

Patch / fix

  • dovecot dovecot 1.1.4
  • dovecot Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1:1.0.15-2.2

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2008-4577

  • dovecot RHEL 5 1.0.7-7.el5

red hat advisories RHSA-2009:0205

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2008-4577 updated cvss 3.6

dovecot: incorrect handling of negative rights in the ACL plugin

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) dovecot 1.0.7-7.el5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop Workstation (v. 5 client) dovecot 1.0.7-7.el5
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2009:0205

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

2.33% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 83% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD 2.0 6.4 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:N

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.