Debian Security Advisory

DSA-3167-1 sudo -- security update

Date Reported:
22 Feb 2015
Affected Packages:
sudo
Vulnerable:
Yes
Security database references:
In the Debian bugtracking system: Bug 772707.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2014-9680.
More information:

Jakub Wilk reported that sudo, a program designed to provide limited super user privileges to specific users, preserves the TZ variable from a user's environment without any sanitization. A user with sudo access may take advantage of this to exploit bugs in the C library functions which parse the TZ environment variable or to open files that the user would not otherwise be able to open. The later could potentially cause changes in system behavior when reading certain device special files or cause the program run via sudo to block.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 1.8.5p2-1+nmu2.

We recommend that you upgrade your sudo packages.