An attacker can leverage sudo’s -R (--chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file.

Sudo versions 1.9.14 to 1.9.17 inclusive are affected.

This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2025-32463 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database.

Sudo’s host (-h or --host) option is intended to be used in conjunction with the list option (-l or --list) to list a user’s sudo privileges on a host other than the current one. However, due to a bug it was not restricted to listing privileges and could be used when running a command via sudo or editing a file with sudoedit. Depending on the rules present in the sudoers file this could allow a local privilege escalation attack.

A flaw exists in sudo’s per-command chroot feature that could result in the variable that stores the command being freed more than once.

Sudo versions 1.9.8 through 1.9.13p1 inclusive are affected. Versions of sudo prior to 1.9.8 are not affected.

This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2023-27320 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database.

A flaw in exists in sudo’s -e option (aka sudoedit) that allows a malicious user with sudoedit privileges to edit arbitrary files.

Sudo versions 1.8.0 through 1.9.12p1 inclusive are affected. Versions of sudo prior to 1.8.0 construct the argument vector differently and are not affected.

This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2023-22809 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database.

A serious heap-based buffer overflow has been discovered in sudo that is exploitable by any local user. It has been given the name Baron Samedit by its discoverer. The bug can be leveraged to elevate privileges to root, even if the user is not listed in the sudoers file. User authentication is not required to exploit the bug.

Sudo versions 1.7.7 through 1.7.10p9, 1.8.2 through 1.8.31p2, and 1.9.0 through 1.9.5p1 are affected.

On systems where SELinux is enabled, sudo’s RBAC support allows a command to be run with a user-specified role and/or type. In order to transition to the target SELinux security context, sudo runs the command through the sesh helper program. When sudo is invoked as sudoedit, sesh is used to first create the editor temporary files with the proper security context and then, once the editor has run, to copy the edited temporary files to their original locations.

Sudo’s pwfeedback option can be used to provide visual feedback when the user is inputting their password. For each key press, an asterisk is printed. This option was added in response to user confusion over how the standard Password: prompt disables the echoing of key presses. While pwfeedback is not enabled by default in the upstream version of sudo, some systems, such as Linux Mint and Elementary OS, do enable it in their default sudoers files.

When sudo is configured to allow a user to run commands as an arbitrary user via the ALL keyword in a Runas specification, it is possible to run commands as root by specifying the user ID -1 or 4294967295.

This can be used by a user with sufficient sudo privileges to run commands as root even if the Runas specification explicitly disallows root access as long as the ALL keyword is listed first in the Runas specification.

On Linux systems, sudo parses the /proc/[pid]/stat file to determine the device number of the process’s tty (field 7). The fields in the file are space-delimited, but it is possible for the command name (field 2) to include white space (including newline), which sudo does not account for. A user with sudo privileges can cause sudo to use a device number of the user’s choosing by creating a symbolic link from the sudo binary to a name that contains white space followed by a number.

A flaw exists in sudo’s noexec functionality that may allow a user with sudo privileges to run additional commands even when the NOEXEC tag has been applied to a command that uses either the system() or popen() functions.

1.6.8 through 1.8.14p3 inclusive.

This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2016-7032 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database.