The *downside* of reverting our custom patch is that end-users are used to all their personal customization of applications from $HOME working; i.e. currently, when anyone runs vim, emacs, bash, etc. under sudo, any ~/.WHATEVER customization they have will be retained. This is different than, essentially, all other UNIXes, and the fix for this bug would undo that, to put us back in line with all other UNIXes - but would result in behavior change for users, where e.g. 'sudo vim' would not pick up any of their ~/.vimrc configuration (or ~/.emacs.d for emacs, etc...)
Thus, this change, if we do make it, probably should only be done to Eoan and not SRUed. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to sudo in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1556302 Title: Ubuntu patch to add HOME to env_keep makes custom commands vulnerable by default Status in sudo package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: I wanted to allow certain users to execute a python script as another user, so I created the following sudoers config: Defaults env_reset source_user ALL=(target_user) NOPASSWD: /home/target_user/bin/script.py This results in a highly insecure Python environment because the source user can set HOME and override any Python package by putting files in $HOME/.local/lib/python*/site-packages/. This should be a safe configuration because the default behaviour (as specified in the man page) is that env_reset will replace HOME with the target user's home directory. The "env_reset" option even has special behaviour for bash which has its own potential environment vulnerabilities. However there is an Ubuntu-specific patch in the package (keep_home_by_default.patch) that makes sudo preserve HOME by default, which negates the correct behaviour of "env_reset". It should not be necessary to explicitly specify the "always_set_home" option in order to negate this patch. The patch should be removed and the default /etc/sudoers should explicitly add HOME to "env_keep" for the "allow admins to run any command as root" entries, to get the desired behaviour without creating security issues for other sudoers commands. Note: for quick reference to anyone coming to this bug, this behavior (of sudo keeping the calling user's $HOME) can be disabled by running 'sudo visudo' and adding this line: Defaults always_set_home To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sudo/+bug/1556302/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
