gh-119511: Fix a potential denial of service in imaplib (GH-119514)

The IMAP4 client could consume an arbitrary amount of memory when trying
to connect to a malicious server, because it read a "literal" data with a
single read(size) call, and BufferedReader.read() allocates the bytes
object of the specified size before reading. Now the IMAP4 client reads data
by chunks, therefore the amount of used memory is limited by the
amount of the data actually been sent by the server.
(cherry picked from commit 735f25c)

Co-authored-by: Serhiy Storchaka <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Gregory P. Smith <[email protected]>

Author: 2 people

Lib/imaplib.py

@@ -52,6 +52,9 @@
 # search command can be quite large, so we now use 1M.
 _MAXLINE = 1000000
 
+# Data larger than this will be read in chunks, to prevent extreme
+# overallocation.
+_SAFE_BUF_SIZE = 1 << 20
 
 #       Commands
 
@@ -315,7 +318,13 @@ def open(self, host='', port=IMAP4_PORT, timeout=None):
 
     def read(self, size):
         """Read 'size' bytes from remote."""
-        return self.file.read(size)
+        cursize = min(size, _SAFE_BUF_SIZE)
+        data = self.file.read(cursize)
+        while cursize < size and len(data) == cursize:
+            delta = min(cursize, size - cursize)
+            data += self.file.read(delta)
+            cursize += delta
+        return data
 
 
     def readline(self):

Lib/test/test_imaplib.py

@@ -901,6 +901,20 @@ def handle(self):
             self.assertRaises(imaplib.IMAP4.error,
                               self.imap_class, *server.server_address)
 
+    def test_truncated_large_literal(self):
+        size = 0
+        class BadHandler(SimpleIMAPHandler):
+            def handle(self):
+                self._send_textline('* OK {%d}' % size)
+                self._send_textline('IMAP4rev1')
+
+        for exponent in range(15, 64):
+            size = 1 << exponent
+            with self.subTest(f"size=2e{size}"):
+                with self.reaped_server(BadHandler) as server:
+                    with self.assertRaises(imaplib.IMAP4.abort):
+                        self.imap_class(*server.server_address)
+
     @threading_helper.reap_threads
     def test_simple_with_statement(self):
         # simplest call

Misc/NEWS.d/next/Security/2024-05-24-21-00-52.gh-issue-119511.jKrXQ8.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+Fix a potential denial of service in the :mod:`imaplib` module. When connecting
+to a malicious server, it could cause an arbitrary amount of memory to be
+allocated. On many systems this is harmless as unused virtual memory is only a
+mapping, but if this hit a virtual address size limit it could lead to a
+:exc:`MemoryError` or other process crash. On unusual systems or builds where
+all allocated memory is touched and backed by actual ram or storage it could've
+consumed resources doing so until similarly crashing.