USN-235-1: sudo vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

Charles Morris discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in
sudo. On executing Perl scripts with sudo, various environment
variables that affect Perl's library search path were not cleaned
properly. If sudo is set up to grant limited sudo execution of Perl
scripts to normal users, this could be exploited to run arbitrary
commands as the target user.

This security update also filters out environment variables that can
be exploited similarly with Python, Ruby, and zsh scripts.

Please note that this does not affect the default Ubuntu installation,
or any setup that just grants full root privileges to certain users.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 5.10

• sudo -

Ubuntu 5.04

• sudo -

Ubuntu 4.10

• sudo -

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

References

• CVE-2005-4158

Related notices

• USN-235-2: sudo