1.270. sudo

1.270.1. RHSA-2011:0599: Low security and bug fix update

An updated sudo package that fixes one security issue and several bugs is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having low security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

The sudo (superuser do) utility allows system administrators to give certain users the ability to run commands as root.

A flaw was found in the sudo password checking logic. In configurations where the sudoers settings allowed a user to run a command using sudo with only the group ID changed, sudo failed to prompt for the user's password before running the specified command with the elevated group privileges. (CVE-2011-0010)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

When the "/etc/sudoers" file contained entries with multiple hosts, running the "sudo -l" command incorrectly reported that a certain user does not have permissions to use sudo on the system. With this update, running the "sudo -l" command now produces the correct output. (BZ#603823)
Prior to this update, the manual page for sudoers.ldap was not installed, even though it contains important information on how to set up an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) sudoers source, and other documents refer to it. With this update, the manual page is now properly included in the package. Additionally, various POD files have been removed from the package, as they are required for build purposes only. (BZ#634159)
The previous version of sudo did not use the same location for the LDAP configuration files as the nss_ldap package. This has been fixed and sudo now looks for these files in the same location as the nss_ldap package. (BZ#652726)
When a file was edited using the "sudo -e file" or the "sudoedit file" command, the editor being executed for this task was logged only as "sudoedit". With this update, the full path to the executable being used as an editor is now logged (instead of "sudoedit"). (BZ#665131)
A comment regarding the "visiblepw" option of the "Defaults" directive has been added to the default "/etc/sudoers" file to clarify its usage. (BZ#688640)
This erratum upgrades sudo to upstream version 1.7.4p5, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. (BZ#615087)

All users of sudo are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which resolves these issues.