A major security hole affecting the Linux ecosystem has been patched since last night in Sudo, a application which allows administrators to give limited root access to other users.
The vulnerability, which has as its identifier the CVE-2021-3156, better known as "Baron Samedit", was discovered by security company Qualys two weeks ago. Fixed last night with the release of Sudo v1.9.5p2 (update immediately).
In a simple explanation provided by the sudo team, the error Baron Samedit can be exploited by an attacker who has gained access to a low-privileged account to gain root access, even if the account is not listed in /etc/sudoers – a configuration file that controls which users are allowed access to commands su or sudo.
For technical details see reference Qualys or the video below.
While two other Sudo security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in the last two years, the error being uncovered today is far more dangerous.
The two previous bugs, CVE-2019-14287 and CVE-2019-18634, were difficult to exploit because they required complex and non-standard sudo settings.
Things are different for the bug revealed today, because it affects all Sudo installations where there are sudoers (/ etc / sudoers) - which is usually found on most default Linux installations - Sudo.
