Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2009-3897 json

Dovecot 1.2.x before 1.2.8 sets 0777 permissions during creation of certain directories at installation time, which allows local users to a…

published 2009-11-24 16 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2009-3868

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 31%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Dovecot 1.2.x before 1.2.8 sets 0777 permissions during creation of certain directories at installation time, which allows local users to access arbitrary user accounts by replacing the auth socket, related to the parent directories of the base_dir directory, and possibly the base_dir directory itself.

Patch / fix

  • dovecot dovecot 1.2.8
  • dovecot Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1:1.2.8-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2009-3897

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-2009-3897 updated cvss 1.9

dovecot: Insecure permissions set for certain directories at installation time

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 dovecot
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 dovecot Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 dovecot, dovecot-mysql, dovecot-pgsql, dovecot-pigeonhole
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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

0.38% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 31% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD 2.0 4.6 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-732 Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource

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.