Flaw In Sudo Enables Non-Privileged Users To Run Commands As Root

'A vulnerability has been discovered in Sudo -- one of the most
important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core
command installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating
system. The vulnerability in question is a sudo security policy bypass
issue that could allow a malicious user or a program to execute
arbitrary commands as root on a targeted Linux system even when the
"sudoers configuration" explicitly disallows the root access. Sudo,
stands for "superuser do," is a system command that allows a user to
run applications or commands with the privileges of a different user
without switching environments -- most often, for running commands as
the root user.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-14287 and discovered by Joe
Vennix of Apple Information Security, is more concerning because the
sudo utility has been designed to let users use their own login
password to execute commands as a different user without requiring
their password. What's more interesting is that this flaw can be
exploited by an attacker to run commands as root just by specifying
the user ID "-1" or "4294967295." That's because the function which
converts user id into its username incorrectly treats -1, or its
unsigned equivalent 4294967295, as 0, which is always the user ID of
root user. The vulnerability affects all Sudo versions prior to the
latest released version 1.8.28, which has been released today.'

-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/10/14/2231235

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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