Exploited in the wild · sudo · CVSS 7.8 · published 26 January 2021
Baron Samedit: CVE-2021-3156
A heap overflow in sudo's command-line parsing that lets any local user gain root, even one not listed in sudoers. Below is its status on each Linux distribution past end of life, from the vendors' own security trackers.
- 1end-of-life systems without a free fix
- 8fixed or not affected
Baron Samedit on end-of-life Linux
| Distribution | Status | Details |
|---|---|---|
| CentOS 6 | No free fix | Red Hat fixed it on 26 January 2021, after this release's end of life |
| CentOS 7 | Fixed | sudo 1.8.23-10.el7_9.1, 27 January 2021 |
| RHEL 7 | Fixed | sudo 1.8.23-10.el7_9.1, 27 January 2021 |
| CentOS 8 | Fixed | sudo 1.8.29-6.el8_3.1, 26 January 2021 |
| Ubuntu 16.04 | Fixed | 1.8.16-0ubuntu1.10 |
| Ubuntu 18.04 | Fixed | 1.8.21p2-3ubuntu1.4 |
| Ubuntu 20.04 | Fixed | 1.8.31-1ubuntu1.2 |
| Debian 10 | Fixed | 1.8.27-1+deb10u3, DSA-4839-1 |
| Debian 11 | Fixed before release | published before this release shipped |
From the Red Hat security data (CentOS and RHEL), the Ubuntu CVE tracker and the Debian security tracker, 29 October 2026. CentOS received Red Hat's fixes only until its own end of life; later fixes went to paid Red Hat support. Fixes marked Ubuntu Pro need a paid subscription. Where a tracker has no entry, the version in the distribution's repository is checked against the NVD range.
What the NVD record says
Sudo before 1.9.5p2 contains an off-by-one error that can result in a heap-based buffer overflow, which allows privilege escalation to root via "sudoedit -s" and a command-line argument that ends with a single backslash character.
Score 7.8 (High), published 26 January 2021. Listed in the CISA catalogue of known exploited vulnerabilities on 6 April 2022. Read the NVD entry
Affected upstream versions of sudo
- sudo from 1.8.2 before 1.8.32
- sudo from 1.9.0 before 1.9.5
- sudo version 1.9.5
What you can do
Keep sudo, patched
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