Two Sudo Vulnerabilities Discovered and Patched

In April researchers responsibly disclosed two security flaws found in Sudo 'that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines,' reports The Hacker News. 'The vulnerabilities have been addressed in Sudo version 1.9.17p1 released late last month.'

Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is credited with discovering and reporting the flaws, said CVE-2025-32462 has managed to slip through the cracks for over 12 years. It is rooted in the Sudo's '-h' (host) option that makes it possible to list a user's sudo privileges for a different host. The feature was enabled in September 2013. However, the identified bug made it possible to execute any command allowed by the remote host to be run on the local machine as well when running the Sudo command with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host. 'This primarily affects sites that use a common sudoers file that is distributed to multiple machines,' Sudo project maintainer Todd C. Miller said in an advisory. 'Sites that use LDAP-based sudoers (including SSSD) are similarly impacted.'

CVE-2025-32463, on the other hand, leverages Sudo's '-R' (chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file. It's also a critical-severity flaw. 'The default Sudo configuration is vulnerable,' Mirch said. 'Although the vulnerability involves the Sudo chroot feature, it does not require any Sudo rules to be defined for the user. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed....'

Miller said the chroot option will be removed completely from a future release of Sudo and that supporting a user-specified root directory is 'error-prone.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.