Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-0084 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-0084 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-0084?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 8.4, published 1 May 1990.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Generic NFS Server.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-0084?
- No fixed version is recorded yet. Check the vendor's advisory in the references below. If you run it, Junglewise drafts a mitigation that fits your setup and applies it once you approve, with senior security engineers behind it.
- How is CVE-1999-0084 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-0084?
- Check whether you run Generic NFS Server or Sun Nfs. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
Technical details
This vulnerability is a privilege escalation flaw resulting from improper management of the mknod operation in certain NFS server implementations. A local attacker can use the mknod command to create a character special file that maps to kernel memory (/dev/kmem). By setting the ownership of this device to UID 0 (root) and ensuring it is writable, the attacker can directly modify kernel memory to escalate their privileges to root. The attack requires local access to an NFS-mounted filesystem that does not properly restrict the creation of device nodes. This issue is categorized under CWE-269 (Improper Privilege Management).
Affected products
- Generic NFS Server
Timeline
- 1990-05-01: disclosed