sudo: Privilege Escalation

Background

sudo allows a system administrator to give users the ability to run commands as other users.

Description

Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in sudo:

• Evan Broder and Anders Kaseorg of Ksplice, Inc. reported that the sudo ‘secure path’ feature does not properly handle multiple PATH variables (CVE-2010-1646).
• Markus Wuethrich of Swiss Post reported that sudo fails to restrict access when using Runas groups and the group (-g) command line option (CVE-2010-2956).

Impact

A local attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to gain the ability to run certain commands with the privileges of other users, including root, depending on the configuration.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All sudo users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-admin/sudo-1.7.4_p3-r1"