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Comment by tomrod

15 hours ago

What? Why is sudo security theater?

Any user process can append anything they want to your shell rc (.bashrc, .zshrc). In this case, they added a bash function for a fake sudo prompt. It then uses the password the user entered to run a malicious payload as root.

  • If you're running a malicious user process with write (or read) access to your files, you are arguably already compromised.

    • The freaking point is that basically anything worth running will have that amount of access, even Flatpaks. And you don't freaking know what's malicious before hand.

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It’s not, but the grandparent does point out 1 major flaw with sudo being a typically command that goes through normal path discovery. It makes it easier to escalate from a compromised user account to a compromised root account, since the end user is likely to type the root password into a command that can be shadowed in their user space.

Because it is trivial for unprivileged malware to phish the password and escalate to root. No production system should ever ship with sudo.

  • You do realize you can do the exact same thing on macOS? Just alias sudo to whatever you want. BSD I assume you can do the same with doas.

    No desktop system is safe from your attack, unless you take specific precautions like chattr on the file or chmodding your home directory, but that can lead to weird breakage.