Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-0101 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-0101 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-0101?
- Critical severity, with a CVSS score of 10, published 10 December 1996.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- IBM AIX; Sun Microsystems Solaris.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-0101?
- 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-1999-0101 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-0101?
- Check whether you run IBM Aix. 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
A classic buffer overflow vulnerability exists within the 'gethostbyname' library function used by AIX and Solaris for DNS resolution. The flaw is triggered when the function processes a DNS response containing an oversized or corrupt host name that exceeds the allocated buffer size. Because this library is utilized by numerous privileged system services and applications, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this overflow to overwrite memory and execute arbitrary code. Successful exploitation typically results in a full compromise of the affected system with root-level privileges. The attack vector is the network, specifically targeting any service that performs name resolution on untrusted input.
Affected products
- IBM AIX
- Sun Microsystems Solaris
Timeline
- 1996-12-10: disclosed