CVE-2021-23239

Severity: low (CVSS 2.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2021-01-12 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-59

Description

The sudoedit personality of Sudo before 1.9.5 may allow a local unprivileged user to perform arbitrary directory-existence tests by winning a sudo_edit.c race condition in replacing a user-controlled directory by a symlink to an arbitrary path.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 32, 33
NetApp Cloud Backup: all versions
NetApp Hci Management Node: all versions
NetApp Solidfire: all versions
sudo: before 1.8.32; from 1.9.0 before 1.9.5 — fixed in 1.8.32, 1.9.5

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: sudo 1.8.32, 1.9.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2021-23239
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00007.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/EE42Y35SMJOLONAIBNYNFC7J44UUZ2Y6/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/GMY4VSSBIND7VAYSN6T7XIWJRWG4GBB3/
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202101-33
https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210129-0010/
https://www.sudo.ws/stable.html#1.9.5
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2021-23239
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00007.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/EE42Y35SMJOLONAIBNYNFC7J44UUZ2Y6/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/GMY4VSSBIND7VAYSN6T7XIWJRWG4GBB3/
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202101-33

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