Debian Long Term Support / LTS Security Information / 2016 / Security Information -- DLA-382-1 sudo

Debian Security Advisory

DLA-382-1 sudo -- LTS security update

Date Reported:

11 Jan 2016

Affected Packages:

sudo

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In the Debian bugtracking system: Bug 804149.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2015-5602.

More information:

When sudo is configured to allow a user to edit files under a directory that they can already write to without using sudo, they can actually edit (read and write) arbitrary files. Daniel Svartman reported that a configuration like this might be introduced unintentionally if the editable files are specified using wildcards, for example:

    operator ALL=(root) sudoedit /home/*/*/test.txt

The default behaviour of sudo has been changed so that it does not allow editing of a file in a directory that the user can write to, or that is reached by following a symlink in a directory that the user can write to. These restrictions can be disabled, but this is strongly discouraged.

For the oldoldstable distribution (squeeze), this has been fixed in version 1.7.4p4-2.squeeze.6.

For the oldstable distribution (wheezy) and the stable distribution (jessie), this will be fixed soon.