Quick answers
- Is CVE-1999-1501 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-1999-1501 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-1999-1501?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 4.6, published 8 April 1998.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- SGI IRIX 6.3 O2 R10K 6.3.
- Is there a fix for CVE-1999-1501?
- A patch was published on 1998-04-08: Patch SG0002869 released to address the issue. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-1999-1501 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
- Am I affected by CVE-1999-1501?
- Check whether you run Sgi Irix. 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 ipxchk and ipxlink binaries in SGI IRIX 6.3 are installed setuid root by default to support Novell IPX networking. These utilities fail to clear or sanitize the Internal Field Separator (IFS) environment variable before making system calls via the system() function. A local attacker can exploit this by setting a custom IFS value to redefine command delimiters, causing the setuid binaries to execute an arbitrary malicious program instead of the intended system utility. While SGI initially attempted to patch this by hardcoding the IFS variable, the final resolution involved removing the setuid bit from ipxlink and removing ipxchk entirely in patch SG0002869.
Affected products
- SGI IRIX 6.3 O2 R10K 6.3
Timeline
- 1997-06-01: disclosed: Initial report to SGI by researcher Fabrice Planchon.
- 1998-04-08: advisory: Public disclosure on Bugtraq.
- 1998-04-08: patched: Patch SG0002869 released to address the issue.