An attacker can leverage sudo's -R (--chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file. Sudo versions 1.9.14 to 1.9.17 inclusive are affected.
A flaw was found in sudo before version 1.8.28. When sudo is configured to allow a user to run commands as an arbitrary user via the 'ALL' keyword in a 'Runas' specification, it is possible to run commands as root.
Admin Framework. A logic issue was addressed with improved checks.
Last updated 25 August 2025
Apple macOS Catalina is vulnerable to a stack-based buffer overflow, caused by improper bounds checking by the privileged sudo process. By sending an overly long string to the stdin of getln() in tgetpass.c., a local attacker could overflow a buffer and execute arbitrary code on the system.
In Sudo through 1.9.17p2 before 3e474c2, a failure of a setuid, setgid, or setgroups call, during a privilege drop before running the mailer, is not a fatal error and can lead to privilege escalation.
A heap-based buffer overflow was found in the way sudo parses command line arguments.
As per the researcher this vulnerability:
- is exploitable by any local user (normal users and system users, sudoers and non-sudoers), without authentication (i.e., the attacker does not need to know the user's password);
- was introduced in July 2011 (commit 8255ed69), and affects all legacy versions from 1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2 and all stable versions from 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1, in their default configuration.
This could lead to privilege escalation.
Quoting first paragraph from [1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showbug.cgi?id=173008
for issue description: ====================== When starting a program via "su - user -c program" the user session can escape to the parent session by using the TIOCSTI ioctl to push characters into the input buffer. This allows for example a non-root session to push "chmod 666 /etc/shadow" or similarly bad commands into the input buffer such that after the end of the session they are executed.
References: [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showbug.cgi?id=173008 [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=628843
Sudo before 1.6.6 contains an off-by-one error that can result in a heap-based buffer overflow that may allow local users to gain root privileges via special characters in the -p (prompt) argument, which are not properly expanded.
Last updated 25 August 2025
Sudo 1.8.0 through 1.9.12, with the crypt() password backend, contains a plugins/sudoers/auth/passwd.c array-out-of-bounds error that can result in a heap-based buffer over-read. This can be triggered by arbitrary local users with access to Sudo by entering a password of seven characters or fewer. The impact could vary depending on the compiler and processor architecture.
sudo before 1.8.12 does not ensure that the TZ environment variable is associated with a zoneinfo file, which allows local users to open arbitrary files for read access (but not view file contents) by running a program within an sudo session, as demonstrated by interfering with terminal output, discarding kernel-log messages, or repositioning tape drives.