sudo vulnerability

20 January 2011

sudo vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

• Ubuntu 10.10
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 9.10

Summary

Under certain circumstances, sudo could be made to run programs without a password.

Software Description

• sudo - Provide limited super user privileges to specific users

Details

Alexander Kurtz discovered that sudo would not prompt for a password when a group was specified in the Runas_Spec. A local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as the specified group if sudo was configured to allow the attacker to use a program as this group. The group Runas_Spec is not used in the default installation of Ubuntu.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 10.10

sudo - 1.7.2p7-1ubuntu2.1

sudo-ldap - 1.7.2p7-1ubuntu2.1

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

sudo - 1.7.2p1-1ubuntu5.3

sudo-ldap - 1.7.2p1-1ubuntu5.3

Ubuntu 9.10

sudo - 1.7.0-1ubuntu2.6

sudo-ldap - 1.7.0-1ubuntu2.6

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2011-0010