What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-23240

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.1% 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

selinux_edit_copy_tfiles in sudoedit in Sudo before 1.9.5 allows a local unprivileged user to gain file ownership and escalate privileges by replacing a temporary file with a symlink to an arbitrary file target. This affects SELinux RBAC support in permissive mode. Machines without SELinux are not vulnerable.

Affected products

• Fedoraproject Fedora: 32, 33
• 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-2021-23240
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r58af02e294bd07f487e2c64ffc0a29b837db5600e33b6e698b9d696b%40%3Cissues.bookkeeper.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf4c02775860db415b4955778a131c2795223f61cb8c6a450893651e4%40%3Cissues.bookkeeper.apache.org%3E
• 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-2021-23240
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r58af02e294bd07f487e2c64ffc0a29b837db5600e33b6e698b9d696b%40%3Cissues.bookkeeper.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf4c02775860db415b4955778a131c2795223f61cb8c6a450893651e4%40%3Cissues.bookkeeper.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/EE42Y35SMJOLONAIBNYNFC7J44UUZ2Y6/

Get alerted when CVE-2021-23240 or the next vulnerability affects your stack