Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-0966 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-0966 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-0966?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.2, published 27 January 1997.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Sun Microsystems Solaris 2.5, 5.5.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-0966?
- 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-1999-0966 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-0966?
- Check whether you run Sunos. 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 exists in the 'getopt' function within the Solaris standard C library (libc). The vulnerability is triggered when a program using getopt is executed with an excessively long string in the first argument of the argument vector (argv[0]). Because many system utilities run with elevated privileges (setuid root), a local attacker can exploit this memory corruption to overwrite the execution stack and redirect process flow to arbitrary code. This results in a full privilege escalation from a standard user to root. The issue affects Solaris 2.5 and SunOS 5.5.
Affected products
- Sun Microsystems Solaris 2.5, 5.5
Timeline
- 1997-01-27: disclosed