sudoedit (`sudo -e`) security flaw (CVE-2023-22809)

nabbisen - Jan 19 '23 - - Dev Community

Security vulnerability

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.

CVE

CVE-2023-22809

Impact

(with appreciation to @jmau111's comments)

The official website statements:

If no users have been granted access to sudoedit there is no impact.

It is the case, for example, that /etc/sudoers (or the target visudo uses) has such a line:

someuser ALL=(root) sudoedit /etc/some.conf
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someuser can edit another file by exploiting the flaw.

Solution

If sudo is 1.8 or greater, it is recommended to update it to the latest version (1.9.12p2) released today, on 2023-01-19.

Temporary workaround

In case that you can't update it right now,

the official website describes there is a way to mitigate it by adding the line below to sudoers:

Defaults!sudoedit    env_delete+="SUDO_EDITOR VISUAL EDITOR"
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Reference

This post is based on the tweets by my company

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