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.
Admin Framework. A logic issue was addressed with improved checks.
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.