Sudo is one of the most essential, powerful, and often used tools that comes as a core command pre-installed on macOS and practically every other UNIX or Linux-based operating system. It is also one of the programs that comes pre-installed as a core command. A system administrator has the ability to delegate authority to certain users or groups of users through the use of the sudo (su “do”) command, which provides an audit trail of the commands that were executed and the arguments that were passed to those commands. This allows the administrator to give certain users or groups of users the ability to run some or all commands as root or another user.
A new sudo vulnerability was found. It was on sudoedit (sudo -e) flaw. With it, attackers can edit arbitrary files, and therefore machines were at the risk of the pwned and having information steeled.
Researchers Matthieu Barjole and Victor Cutillas of Synacktiv uncovered the weakness, which was given the identifier CVE-2023-22809, in the sudoedit function for Linux. This vulnerability might enable a malicious user with sudoedit access to edit arbitrary files on a system running Linux.
In order to give its users with the ability to pick the editor of their choosing, Sudo makes use of environment variables that are supplied by the user. The contents of these variables provide additional information to the command that is ultimately sent to the sudo edit() function. The latter, on the other hand, is dependent on the existence of the — argument in order to establish the list of files that need to be edited. This list may be changed by the insertion of an additional — argument into one of the approved environment variables, which can then lead to a privilege escalation through the modification of any other file with the rights of the RunAs user. This problem appears after the sudoers policy validation has been completed.
Versions of sudo that came out before 1.8.0 built the argument vector in a different way and are not impacted by this issue. It is strongly suggested that users get their systems up to date with the most recent version.
Information security specialist, currently working as risk infrastructure specialist & investigator.
15 years of experience in risk and control process, security audit support, business continuity design and support, workgroup management and information security standards.
