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Ten-Year Old sudo Vulnerability Gives Root Privileges on Host

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 28 2021, @07:31AM   
from the hiding-in-plain-site dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Ten-Year Old Sudo Vulnerability Gives Root Privileges on Host:

A major security hole in the Sudo utility could be abused by unprivileged users to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host, Qualys reports.

Designed to allow users to run programs with the security privileges of another user (by default superuser, hence the name, which is derived from 'superuser do'), Sudo is present in major Unix- and Linux-based operating systems out there.

Tracked as CVE-2021-3156, the recently identified vulnerability, which Qualys refers to as "Baron Samedit," was introduced in July 2011, and can be exploited to gain root privileges using a default Sudo configuration.

This means that an attacker able to compromise a low-privileged account on the machine could abuse the vulnerability to gain root access.

All legacy versions of Sudo, from 1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2, as well as the utility's stable releases from 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1 are affected, in their default configuration.

[...] Qualys, which provides an in-depth technical analysis of the vulnerability, has published a proof-of-concept video to demonstrate how the issue can be exploited.

Also at Bleeping Computer.

CVE-2021-3156: Heap-Based Buffer Overflow in Sudo (Baron Samedit)

CVE-2021-3156

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Original Submission

• Important piece missing from the summary Important piece missing from the summary (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:44PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:44PM (#1106110)

  WHY isn't this included in the summary? It is perhaps the most important piece of information involved.

  The bug was reported to the Sudo team a couple of weeks ago, and patches were rolled out today. Sudo v1.9.5p2 resolves the vulnerability.

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• Re:Important piece missing from the summary (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday January 29 2021, @10:23AM

  by tangomargarine (667) on Friday January 29 2021, @10:23AM (#1106534)

  Because otherwise the article would've called it a zero-day?

  God I hate that term so much. 95% of exploits are "zero-days" yet people have to constantly, breathlessly use the term like it's shocking that they still are a thing. Of fucking *course* most of them are, because usually the company will get to work on fixing them ASAP.

  --
  "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

  Parent