Apple’s macOS Big Sur operating system and multiple Cisco products are also affected by the recently disclosed major security flaw in the Sudo utility.
Tracked as CVE-2021-3156 and referred to as Baron Samedit, the issue is a heap-based buffer overflow that can be exploited by unprivileged users to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host.
For privilege escalation to root, the user needs to leverage "sudoedit -s" along with a command-line argument ending with a single backslash character.
The vulnerability was patched in Sudo 1.9.5p2.
Researchers at cybersecurity firm Qualys, who discovered the bug, only tested it on several Linux distributions, such as Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, but did warn that most Unix- and Linux-based systems are likely affected by the vulnerability.
According to Hacker House co-founder Matthew Hickey, Apple’s macOS Big Sur is one of the affected operating systems.
“CVE-2021-3156 also impacts @apple MacOS Big Sur (unpatched at present), you can enable exploitation of the issue by symlinking sudo to sudoedit and then triggering the heap overflow to escalate one's privileges to 1337 uid=0,” he said on Twitter.
Replying to Hickey, Will Dormann, a researcher with Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center, has confirmed that macOS Big Sur is indeed vulnerable.
Apple this week issued patches for more than 60 vulnerabilities in macOS Big Sur, Catalina, and Mojave, but none of these addresses the bug in Sudo.
