Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-0163 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-0163 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-0163?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.2, published 1 January 1997.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Sendmail Sendmail Older versions (pre-1997).
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-0163?
- 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-1999-0163 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-0163?
- Check whether you run Eric Allman Sendmail. 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 command injection flaw in Sendmail's handling of the pipe ('|') character. A local attacker can provide input containing a pipe character to the Sendmail binary, which fails to properly sanitize the input before passing it to a shell. Because Sendmail often runs with elevated privileges (setuid root) to handle mail delivery, this allows the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as the root user. The vulnerability is exploited locally and does not require prior authentication beyond access to the system's mail utilities. Modern versions of Sendmail have long since patched this behavior by improving input validation and dropping privileges where possible.
Affected products
- Sendmail Sendmail Older versions (pre-1997)
Timeline
- 1997-01-01: disclosed: Initial NVD publication date