Skip to content

CVE-2021-3156: Baron Samedit

Is CVE-2021-3156 real, exploitable, or a false positive? Here's the community verdict.

signals

public sources

Exploited in wild
Yes
CISA KEV
Public exploit
Metasploit +1
Metasploit/EDB/PoC
Base severity
7.8 High
CVSS
Exploitation prob.
99%
FIRST EPSS
Weakness
CWE-193
CWE

Confirmed exploited in the wild. Patch this first, regardless of the base score.

public exploits

links to sources — we don’t host code

A working exploit is publicly available from a maintained source. Treat this as higher urgency and verify your exposure.

baseline read

auto · not a community verdict

Real — exploited in the wild

CISA confirms active exploitation. Treat scanner hits as true positives unless your specific version or config is unaffected.

Based on CISA KEV

Confirm or dispute →

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Sudo before 1.9.5p2 contains an off-by-one error that can result in a heap-based buffer overflow, which allows privilege escalation to root via "sudoedit -s" and a command-line argument that ends with a single backslash character.

Published

Embed this verdict
TruePositive verdict for CVE-2021-3156
Markdown
[![TruePositive verdict](https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2021-3156/badge.svg)](https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2021-3156)
HTML
<a href="https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2021-3156"><img src="https://www.truepositive.app/cve/CVE-2021-3156/badge.svg" alt="TruePositive verdict for CVE-2021-3156"></a>

Live badge that updates automatically as the community verdict changes.

Community ground truth

Be the first practitioner to weigh in

So far this is only TruePositive's editorial baseline from public sources. Add your real-world verdict below — it becomes the signal the next person triaging this relies on.

🥇 The first 50 practitioners to contribute earn a Founding Contributor badge.

In your experience, is this finding real and exploitable?

awaiting field verdicts
Real, but not a risk here
Not a real issue

Curated baseline: TruePositive's read from public sources is Real & exploitable — a starting point, not a community verdict.

No account needed. Anonymous verdicts post as an unverified signal. Log in to make yours verified and earn reputation.

Field notes & remediation

Verdicts are the quick signal. Notes are the evidence and fixes behind them.

  • 0
    Field note · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    A heap buffer overflow in sudo, reachable through the way sudoedit parses its arguments, gives a local user root. It is local only, so high rather than critical, but sudo is on almost every Unix and Linux system and the exploit works reliably across many distributions, so it is a standard privilege-escalation step once an attacker has any shell.

    Who is affected: sudo versions 1.8.2 through 1.8.31p2 and 1.9.0 through 1.9.5p1.

    How to check: run sudo --version and compare, or run the maintainer's documented test to see whether an unpatched build crashes.

    Commonly flagged by: Nessus, Qualys, OpenVAS, Trivy.

  • 0
    Remediation · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    Update sudo to 1.9.5p2 or later from your OS vendor. There is no clean workaround, so patching is the fix. After updating, confirm the version and that the known test no longer crashes.

Add a field note or remediationoptional
Note type

What are you adding?

Markdown supported · minimum 20 characters.

Same weakness: CWE-193.