Tom's Journal

While I am a Postfix user, I still try to keep up to date with what’s happening with Sendmail. Sendmail release 8.13.7 fixes a security problem that can be triggered by, well, I’ll let you read the message:

It fixes a potential denial of service problem caused by excessive recursion which leads to stack exhaustion when attempting delivery of a malformed MIME message. Therefore, the function mime8to7() has been modified to limit the recursion level at (the compile time constant) MAXMIMENESTING.

I got all excited in a computer-security-geeky-kind-of-way when I read this. I though, “cool! Are we now going to see a rash of new security holes as everyone checks their source code for recursive functions and figures out ways to trigger infinite recursion?”

Then I realized... hardly anyone uses recursion. There will be no rash. Dang. :)