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Bug 1277426 (CVE-2015-5602) - CVE-2015-5602 sudo: Unauthorized privilege escalation in sudoedit
Summary: CVE-2015-5602 sudo: Unauthorized privilege escalation in sudoedit
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: CVE-2015-5602
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Red Hat Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 1277427
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2015-11-03 10:05 UTC by Adam Mariš
Modified: 2019-09-29 13:39 UTC (History)
10 users (show)

Fixed In Version: sudo 1.8.15
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-11-11 15:07:12 UTC
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Adam Mariš 2015-11-03 10:05:42 UTC 
An unauthorized privilege escalation was found in sudoedit when a user is granted with root access to modify a particular file that could be located in a subset of directories. It seems that sudoedit does not check the full path if a wildcard is used twice (e.g. /home/*/*/file.txt), allowing a malicious user to replace the file.txt real file with a symbolic link to a different location (e.g. /etc/shadow), which results into unauthorized access. Affected versions are <= 1.8.14.

Reproducer can be found here:

https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/37710/
Comment 1 Adam Mariš 2015-11-03 10:06:13 UTC 
Created sudo tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: fedora-all [bug 1277427]
Comment 2 Adam Mariš 2015-11-05 16:15:01 UTC 
Upstream patch:

http://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/9636fd256325
Comment 3 Fedora Update System 2015-11-08 06:50:56 UTC 
sudo-1.8.15-1.fc23 has been pushed to the Fedora 23 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2015-11-08 09:48:45 UTC 
sudo-1.8.15-1.fc22 has been pushed to the Fedora 22 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
Comment 5 Stefan Cornelius 2015-11-11 15:05:50 UTC 
Configurations like the one mentioned in comment #0, where a user has edit or execute privileges for files in a directory writeable by the user, are inherently dangerous.

It's (almost?) impossible to make such scenarios entirely secure and controllable. Even with the upstream patch, which disables following symlinks by default, there is no full protection.

I can only recommend to migrate to a more secure configuration.
Comment 7 Tomas Hoger 2016-01-19 12:53:31 UTC 
Upstream bug report for this issue:

https://bugzilla.sudo.ws/show_bug.cgi?id=707

It notes that the fix in 1.8.15 does not completely address the issue.  Following additional changes were applied post 1.8.16:

https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/33272418bb10
https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/c2e36a80a279

And also related:

https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/b41c5b289f35
https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/574e4a840879
https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/3f559a389bf9
https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/rev/fe50d0c1f1b9
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