Security issues discovered in sudo-rs | Hacker News Reader

Security issues discovered in sudo-rs

lists.debian.org

24 pointskahlonel15 comments

To save everyone a click, the text is:

""" Two security issues were discovered in sudo-rs, a Rust-based implemention of sudo (and su), which could result in the local disclosure of partially typed passwords or an authentication bypass in some targetpw/rootpw configurations.

For the stable distribution (trixie), this problem has been fixed in version 0.2.5-5+deb13u1.

We recommend that you upgrade your rust-sudo-rs packages. """

as far as i can see, it's just programming errors, nothing to do with rust.

Everything to do with reimplementing sudo, though.

But sudo has its share of CVEs as well (latest CVE-2025-32463), so perhaps a fresh look on the tool is warranted; perhaps some learnings have been taken from it.

I think if rust was used to replace other bits (say things like utilities like grep or whatever) instead of security vital things like sudo, there would be less complaints.

Do you mean like uutils/coreutils.. Which certainly collects complaints :).

No doubt. I'm just guessing people would grumble less.

A fresh look would be perhaps doas [1] from the OpenBSD project.

[1]: https://man.openbsd.org/doas.1

sudo-rs tries to be more or less a drop-in replacement for the original one, though, meaning minimal reconfiguration should be required for it.

Do they have test suite comparable to that of original sudo, or can they reuse the test suite of original sudo?

Same could be said about many of the real sudo bugs, but that argument doesn't stick with rust fanboys.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I love rust, I hate fanboys and rewrites)

What were the actual fixes like?

There is a link to github commit in the "Notes" section for each CVE [1].

[1]: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/r...

Well, doesn't seem the issue would have been avoidable other than with "harder thinking" or better testing or something like that.

Maybe model checkers could be used, but perhaps the search space is too large for all the featuers, and keeping the source in sync with the model could be quite fragile. And who knows, maybe the model would have the same issue.

Sudo is overcomplicated and since this is a drop-in replacement, it inherits all the complexities.

But memory safety!

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