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How aggressively to reject Pipelining errors?

2011-10-06 19:54:49

In order to deal with the STARTTLS plaintext command injection vulnerability (CERT VU#555316), I added a check in my commands parser to error out on "illegal pipelining": if there is anything in the read I/O buffer when there shouldn't be, I return a 421 response and drop the connection. My reasoning was that I don't want to allow the session to continue if the client appears to be testing for that vulnerability.

At the moment, I'm only performing this check after the STARTTLS command. But that got me to wondering: would it be wise/unwise to check after other commands, e.g., EHLO, DATA, or AUTH? RFC 2920 is silent on the topic of what the server may do if the client violates the rules.

<csg>

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