Cybersecurity researchers have identified two significant security vulnerabilities in the Sudo command-line utility, commonly used in Linux and Unix-like systems. These flaws could allow local attackers to escalate their privileges and gain root access on affected machines.
Sudo is a powerful tool that lets low-privileged users execute commands as another user—typically the superuser—enabling administrative actions without requiring full access. It’s designed to enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring users can perform necessary tasks without compromising system security.
However, the newly disclosed vulnerabilities undermine that principle:
- CVE-2025-32462 (CVSS score: 2.8): Affects versions of Sudo before 1.9.17p1. When used with a
sudoersconfiguration that specifies a host name not matching the current machine or theALLwildcard, it can allow permitted users to run commands on unintended systems. - CVE-2025-32463 (CVSS score: 9.3): Also affects versions before 1.9.17p1. This critical flaw lets local users gain root privileges by exploiting the
--chrootoption. Specifically, Sudo may load the/etc/nsswitch.conffile from a directory controlled by the attacker, allowing them to trick the utility into loading a malicious shared library.
This second vulnerability is particularly dangerous, as it can allow attackers to run arbitrary code with root-level access, simply by crafting a specific directory structure and configuration file.
System administrators are strongly encouraged to update to the latest version of Sudo to mitigate these risks.