Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-1186 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-1186 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-1186?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.2, published 2 January 1996.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- rxvt project rxvt Slackware 3.0, RedHat 2.1, and other systems where rxvt is suid root.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-1186?
- 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-1999-1186 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-1186?
- Check whether you run Redhat Linux, Rxvt or Slackware Linux. 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 rxvt terminal emulator, when compiled with the PRINT_PIPE option and installed with the setuid root bit (often required for utmp logging), fails to drop privileges before invoking a pipe to a printer command. An attacker can use the '-print-pipe' command-line argument to specify an arbitrary executable instead of the intended printer utility. By sending the VT100 'printer-on' escape sequence (ESC[5i) to the terminal, the attacker triggers a popen() call that executes the malicious program with root privileges. This vulnerability affects early Linux distributions like Slackware 3.0 and RedHat 2.1. A temporary mitigation is to remove the setuid bit from the rxvt binary.
Affected products
- rxvt project rxvt Slackware 3.0, RedHat 2.1, and other systems where rxvt is suid root
Timeline
- 1996-01-02: disclosed: Initial bugtraq disclosure by David J Meltzer
- 1996-01-02: advisory: NVD published date