Bugs Found in sudo

Jul 07, 2025

Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.

Nearly all major Linux distributions are vulnerable to a couple of sudo bugs. The two vulnerabilities are CVE-2025-32462 and CVE-2025-32463. Although the first bug has a low Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 2.8, the second has a score of 9.3, which is critical.

Both vulnerabilities were discovered by the Stratascale's Cybersecurity Research Unit and the full report can be read here. One very interesting point in the report states that "CVE-2025-32462 has remained unnoticed for over 12 years, despite being present in the code all along." 

The report then mentions CVE-2025-32462, when it says, it "...is an issue that has been hidden in plain sight since the host option was implemented 12 years ago. Because it’s a built-in option, no exploit is needed to elevate privileges." The report continues, "However, the issue can only be leveraged with specific configurations using the Host or Host_Alias directives, which are commonly used in enterprise environments."

The sudo --host option allows users to list their sudo rules for a particular host, and the report goes into detail on how this works in conjunction with the flaws.

As far as mitigation is concerned, the only thing you need to do is to confirm that your system's sudo version is at least version 1.9.17p1 or later, which can be done with the command sudo -V. If your version is older than 1.9.17p1, update immediately.
 
 

 
 
 

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