sudo: Unauthorized privilege escalation in sudoedit

Background

sudo (su “do”) allows a system administrator to delegate authority to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.

Description

sudoedit in sudo is vulnerable to the escalation of privileges by local users via a symlink attack. This can be exploited by a file whose full path is defined using multiple wildcards in “/etc/sudoers”, as demonstrated by “/home///file.txt”.

Impact

Local users are able to gain unauthorized privileges on the system.

Workaround

There is no known work around at this time.

Resolution

All sudo users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-admin/sudo-1.8.15-r1"