sudo vulnerability

30 June 2010

sudo vulnerability

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

• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 9.10
• Ubuntu 9.04
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Summary

Under certain conditions, a user might be able to run commands with administrative privileges.

Software Description

• sudo - Provide limited super user privileges to specific users

Details

Evan Broder and Anders Kaseorg discovered that sudo did not properly sanitize its environment when configured to use secure_path (the default in Ubuntu). A local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as root if sudo was configured to allow the attacker to use a program that interpreted the PATH environment variable.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

sudo - 1.7.2p1-1ubuntu5.1

sudo-ldap - 1.7.2p1-1ubuntu5.1

Ubuntu 9.10

sudo - 1.7.0-1ubuntu2.4

sudo-ldap - 1.7.0-1ubuntu2.4

Ubuntu 9.04

sudo - 1.6.9p17-1ubuntu3.3

sudo-ldap - 1.6.9p17-1ubuntu3.3

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

sudo - 1.6.9p10-1ubuntu3.8

sudo-ldap - 1.6.9p10-1ubuntu3.8

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

sudo - 1.6.8p12-1ubuntu6.3

sudo-ldap - 1.6.8p12-1ubuntu6.3

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-2010-1646