Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-0144 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-0144 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-0144?
- Low severity, with a CVSS score of 2.1, published 1 June 1997.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- qmail_project qmail All versions prior to June 1997.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-0144?
- 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-1999-0144 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a hosted service.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-0144?
- Check whether you run Qmail Project Qmail. 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
The qmail-smtpd component fails to impose a configurable upper bound on the number of RCPT commands processed during a single SMTP session. By sending an unlimited stream of recipient addresses, a remote attacker can trigger dynamic memory allocation that eventually exhausts available swap space or physical memory. This is a resource exhaustion vulnerability (CWE-400) that results in a denial of service. While the vendor argued that system-level resource limits (rlimits) should mitigate this, the lack of application-level bounds allows for trivial exploitation on default configurations.
Affected products
- qmail_project qmail All versions prior to June 1997
Timeline
- 1997-06-01: disclosed: Initial discovery and public discussion by Wietse Venema
- 1997-06-01: advisory: NVD publication date