USN-4154-1: Sudo vulnerability

14 October 2019

Sudo could be made to run commands as root if it called with a specially crafted user ID.

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Releases

Packages

  • sudo - Provide limited super user privileges to specific users

Details

Joe Vennix discovered that Sudo incorrectly handled
certain user IDs. An attacker could potentially exploit this
to execute arbitrary commands as the root user.

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 19.04
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

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Further reading