A heap based buffer overflow exists in the sudo command line utility that can be exploited by a local attacker to gain elevated privileges. The vulnerability was introduced in July of 2011 and affects version 1.8.2 through 1.8.31p2 as well as 1.9.0 through 1.9.5p1 in their default configurations. The technique used by this implementation leverages the overflow to overwrite a service_user struct in memory to reference an attacker controlled library which results in it being loaded with the elevated privileges held by sudo.
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