Sudo privilege escalation vulnerability [CVE-2023-22809]

CVE number = CVE-2023-22809

In Sudo before 1.9.12p2, the sudoedit (aka -e) feature mishandles extra arguments passed in the user-provided environment variables (SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL, and EDITOR), allowing a local attacker to append arbitrary entries to the list of files to process.

This can lead to privilege escalation.

Affected versions are 1.8.0 through 1.9.12.p1.

The problem exists because a user-specified editor may contain a “–” argument that defeats a protection mechanism, e.g., an EDITOR=’vim — /path/to/extra/file’ value.

The technical analysis can be found in the following security advisory:

https://www.synacktiv.com/sites/default/files/2023-01/sudo-CVE-2023-22809.pdf