Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-1388 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-1388 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-1388?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 6.2, published 13 May 1994.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Sun Microsystems SunOS 4.1.x.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-1388?
- 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-1999-1388 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-1388?
- 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
The passwd utility in SunOS 4.1.x is vulnerable to a symbolic link (symlink) attack. A local attacker can exploit the '-F' command line argument to redirect file write operations to arbitrary locations on the file system. By creating a symlink at a temporary file path used by the utility, the attacker can force the elevated process to overwrite sensitive system files. This results in a loss of integrity and availability, potentially allowing for full system takeover. This is a classic race condition/link following vulnerability in a setuid or privileged binary.
Affected products
- Sun Microsystems SunOS 4.1.x
Timeline
- 1994-05-13: disclosed: Initial publication date in NVD/Bugtraq references.