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From 2017, there are at least 5 discovered security issues in sudo[1]. It seems a bit too untested for something running in root and interacting with all users. [1]: https://www.sudo.ws/
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Even if there were basic unit & regression tests, this bug might not have been caught. This bug should have gone through detailed security review and should probably also undergo fuzzing.
You can bet your bottom banana that the GRU, the NSA, Chinese state security, and the mob have all thoroughly fuzzed sudo and are sitting on the results. It just seems SO EASY to add a test for this problem, literally the relevant test input is one slash by itself, or any string ending in a slash! So simple! If I sent a change like this at work, no matter how trivial, that said it fixed this bug but I didn't send any…
Folk love to bring up "responsibility" and all of that, but you can't really expect people to bear the responsibility of the world on their shoulders for their spare time projects. It's neither realistic nor fair.
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Why? After all it is obvious code reviewers are enough to catch any typical C memory corruption error.
Firstly, the constant nagging (of the kind appearing here, and often on other HN threads) against C and family are obnoxious. Any language will have both downsides and upsides and picking this one "flaw" in C and then pretending like it's a reason that C absolutely shouldn't be used is absurd. Secondly, the Sudo code in question seems to be a result of a poor or nonexistent design process (which also seems consistent…
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That would indeed be a huge feat of programming skill! I refer you to the configuration file documentation to treat as a spec: https://www.sudo.ws/man/1.8.3/sudoers.man.html Implementing a subset of sudo is a weekend project, for some values of useful.
That's part of the dark outcome of so many untested features: it makes it easy to cast FUD upon any potential replacements. As we have no black-box test suite that shows `sudo` implements all of these features, so we also cannot have faith that any replacement would. Ideally it should be possible to run sudo's black box tests against any potential replacement. To start with, we need those tests.
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Even if there were basic unit & regression tests, this bug might not have been caught. This bug should have gone through detailed security review and should probably also undergo fuzzing.
You can bet your bottom banana that the GRU, the NSA, Chinese state security, and the mob have all thoroughly fuzzed sudo and are sitting on the results. It just seems SO EASY to add a test for this problem, literally the relevant test input is one slash by itself, or any string ending in a slash! So simple! If I sent a change like this at work, no matter how trivial, that said it fixed this bug but I didn't send any…
Then do it! On your own time, rather than complaining that someone else didn't do it on theirs!
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You can bet your bottom banana that the GRU, the NSA, Chinese state security, and the mob have all thoroughly fuzzed sudo and are sitting on the results. It just seems SO EASY to add a test for this problem, literally the relevant test input is one slash by itself, or any string ending in a slash! So simple! If I sent a change like this at work, no matter how trivial, that said it fixed this bug but I didn't send any…
Maybe expecting projects that mostly consist of a single guy working on it in their spare time to be "NSA proof" isn't really realistic? Folk love to bring up "responsibility" and all of that, but you can't really expect people to bear the responsibility of the world on their shoulders for their spare time projects. It's neither realistic nor fair.
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Maybe expecting projects that mostly consist of a single guy working on it in their spare time to be "NSA proof" isn't really realistic? Folk love to bring up "responsibility" and all of that, but you can't really expect people to bear the responsibility of the world on their shoulders for their spare time projects. It's neither realistic nor fair.
No, but having tests is an acceptable baseline.
All you need to know about sudo and frankly most other pieces of the Linux userspace is that it is undertested. The commit that added this flaw to sudo claims to fix a parser bug but includes no tests. There is no reason for the author, the reviewer (if there even was such a person), or anyone else to believe that the bug existed or was fixed by this change. The pull request that supposedly fixes this CVE also includ…
I think the design of the relevant code is worse than the lack of relevant test coverage. The problem solved insecurely by the code instead seems like an obvious target for lexical and syntactic analysis (and this has been so since the sixties, I think).
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> Despite this, the wisdom of the crowd is that you should never su to root, for ... reasons? `su` takes the password of the user you're becoming, while `sudo` takes the password (or not) of the user you already are. So using `su` to become root implies that there's a root password that multiple people (well, assuming there's multiple admins on the box) know.
sudo su My favorite command.
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No, complexity strikes again. I haven't used sudo in years, preferring to use doas now. Its essential code is less than 500 lines and it does everything I've ever used sudo for, and that includes much more than `sudo `. $ man doas | wc -l 58 $ man doas.conf | wc -l 101 $ man sudo | wc -l 741 $ man sudoers | wc -l 3254 And a bonus: $ man sudoers | grep -C1 despair The sudoers file grammar will be described below in Ex…
But if sudo were written in Rust, it could have the same level of complexity and not be vulnerable. Yes, it would still be vulnerable to logic errors, like the last famous sudo bug where you pass -1 as the UID. But it wouldn't be vulnerable to this. (And this isn't the first memory safety bug to be found in sudo.) Yes, sudo's complexity is useless for 99.99% of its users. But wouldn't it be nice if the result were me…