Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-0297 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-0297 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-0297?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.2, published 12 December 1996.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Paul Vixie Cron up to 3.0.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-0297?
- 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-1999-0297 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-0297?
- Check whether you run Bsdi Bsd Os, Freebsd, Netbsd or one of the others listed at an affected version. 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 buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the Vixie Cron library (up to version 3.0) due to improper bounds checking when handling environmental variables. A local, unprivileged attacker can exploit this by providing an excessively long environmental variable to the cron process. Because cron often runs with elevated privileges to execute scheduled tasks for various users, overflowing the buffer allows the attacker to overwrite memory and execute arbitrary code with root permissions. This is a classic local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability.
Affected products
- Vixie Cron library up to 3.0
Timeline
- 1996-12-12: disclosed