RUSTSEC-2023-0069: sudo-rs: Path Traversal vulnerability

What to do

1. See which version you have: cargo tree -i sudo-rs (it also shows which of your dependencies pulls it in).
2. Update within your version requirement: cargo update -p sudo-rs. If the fix is a newer major or minor than your requirement allows, raise it in Cargo.toml (for example sudo-rs = "0.2.1") or update the dependency that pulls it in.
3. Check again with cargo audit, or paste your Cargo.lock into our Cargo.toml checker.

Details from the advisory

Impact

An issue was discovered where usernames containing the . and / characters could result in the corruption of specific files on the filesystem. As usernames are generally not limited by the characters they can contain, a username appearing to be a relative path can be constructed. For example we could add a user to the system containing the username ../../../../bin/cp. When logged in as a user with that name, that user could run sudo -K to clear their session record file. The session code then constructs the path to the session file by concatenating the username to the session file storage directory, resulting in a resolved path of /bin/cp. The code then clears that file, resulting in the cp binary effectively being removed from the system.

An attacker needs to be able to login as a user with a constructed username. Given that such a username is unlikely to exist on an existing system, they will also need to be able to create the users with the constructed usernames.

Patches

The bug is fixed in version 0.2.1 of sudo-rs. Sudo-rs now uses the uid for the user instead of their username for determining the filename. Note that an upgrade to this version will result in existing session files being ignored and users will be forced to re-authenticate. It also fully eliminates any possibility of path traversal, given that uids are always integer values.

The issue was corrected in commit bfdbda22968e3de43fa8246cab1681cfd5d5493d.

References

• Package: crates.io/crates/sudo-rs
• Advisory: rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2023-0069.html
• Web: github.com/memorysafety/sudo-rs/commit/bfdbda22968e3de43fa8246cab1681cfd5d5493d
• Web: cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2023-42456

From the RustSec Advisory Database (CC0-1.0) via the OSV export, downloaded Oct 24, 2026. Severity score computed from the published CVSS vector.

Other advisories for sudo-rs

• VulnerabilityGHSA-98cv-wqjx-wx8f · 2025-05-13sudo-rs Allows Low Privilege Users to Discover the Existence of Files in Inaccessible Folders
• VulnerabilityGHSA-c978-wq47-pvvw · 2025-11-12sudo-rs: Partial password reveal is possible after timeout
• VulnerabilityGHSA-q428-6v73-fc4q · 2025-11-13sudo-rs doesn't record authenticating user properly in timestamp
• VulnerabilityGHSA-w9q3-g4p5-5q2r · 2025-05-13sudo-rs Allows Low Privilege Users to Enumerate Privileges of Others

Full security history of sudo-rs