USN-1046-1: Sudo vulnerability

20 January 2011

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

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Releases

Packages

  • 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.

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 9.10
Ubuntu 10.10
Ubuntu 10.04

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

References