CVE-2026-126135
Received
Received - Intake
STARTTLS Man-in-the-Middle Spoofing in Thunderbird
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-126135, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-11-10
Last updated on: 2026-11-10
Assigner: Mozilla Corporation
Description
Description
If an attacker was able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on an SMTP or POP3 server connection using STARTTLS, the attacker could inject server responses before the TLS handshake completed. Thunderbird would process these responses after the handshake, as if they had been received from the server over the encrypted connection. This could be used to make Thunderbird report a different outcome for sending or fetching mail, and to show attacker-controlled text in error messages. The encrypted connection itself was not compromised, and credentials were not exposed. Connections using SSL/TLS instead of STARTTLS were not affected. This vulnerability was fixed in Thunderbird 160 and Thunderbird 153.7.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| mozilla | thunderbird | 160 |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-UNKNOWN |
