CVE-1999-1299: Red Hat Linux

High severity, CVSS 10.0. EPSS: 1.8% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

rcp on various Linux systems including Red Hat 4.0 allows a "nobody" user or other user with UID of 65535 to overwrite arbitrary files, since 65535 is interpreted as -1 by chown and other system calls, which causes the calls to fail to modify the ownership of the file.

Affected products

• Red Hat Linux: version 4.0 only
• Slackware Slackware Linux: version 3.1 only

Published 1997-02-03. Last modified 2026-06-16.