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sudo-rs

A safety oriented and memory safe implementation of sudo and su written in Rust.

Status of this project

Sudo-rs is being developed further; features you might expect from original sudo may still be unimplemented or not planned. If there is an important one you need, please request it using the issue tracker. If you encounter any usability bugs, also please report them on the issue tracker. Suspected vulnerabilities can be reported on our security page.

An audit of sudo-rs version 0.2.0 has been performed in August 2023. The findings from that audit are addressed in the current version.

Sudo-rs currently is targeted for Linux-based operating systems only; Linux kernel 5.9 or newer is necessary to run sudo-rs.

Installing sudo-rs

The recommended way to start using sudo-rs is via the package manager of your Linux distribution.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux can be installed via AUR sudo-rs or sudo-rs-git.

Note: AUR usage help

yay -Syu sudo-rs

Debian/Ubuntu

If you are running Debian 13 (trixie) or later, or Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) or later, you can use:

sudo apt-get install sudo-rs

This will offer the functionality using the commands su-rs and sudo-rs. If you want to invoke sudo-rs via the usual commands sudo and su instead, prepend /usr/lib/cargo/bin to your current $PATH variable.

Fedora

If you are running Fedora 38 or later, you can use:

sudo dnf install sudo-rs

This will offer the functionality using the commands su-rs and sudo-rs.

Installing our pre-compiled x86-64 binaries

You can also switch to sudo-rs manually by using our pre-compiled tarballs. We currently only offer these for x86-64 systems.

We recommend installing sudo-rs and su-s in your /usr/local hierarchy using the commands:

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xvf sudo-VERSION.tar.gz

and for su-rs:

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xvf su-VERSION.tar.gz

This will install sudo-rs and su-rs in /usr/local/bin using the usual commands sudo and su.

Building from source

Sudo-rs is written in Rust. The minimum required Rust version is 1.70. If your Linux distribution does not package that version (or a later one), you can always install the most recent version through rustup. You also need the C development files for PAM (libpam0g-dev on Debian, pam-devel on Fedora).

On Ubuntu or Debian-based systems, use the following command to install the PAM development library:

sudo apt-get install libpam0g-dev

On Fedora, CentOS and other Red Hat-based systems, you can use the following command:

sudo yum install pam-devel

With dependencies installed, building sudo-rs is a simple matter of:

cargo build --release

This produces a binary target/release/sudo. However, this binary must have the setuid flag set and must be owned by the root user in order to provide any useful functionality. Consult your operating system manual for details. On operating systems other than Linux we also require an environment variable SUDO_RS_IS_UNSTABLE to be set, and it must have the value I accept that my system may break unexpectedly. This because we are in an early stage of supporting non-Linux OSes. If you are unsure about how to set this up, then the current version of sudo is not intended for you.

Sudo-rs needs the sudoers configuration file. The sudoers configuration file will be loaded from /etc/sudoers-rs if that file exists, otherwise the original /etc/sudoers location will be used. You must make sure that a valid sudoers configuration exists at that location. For an explanation of the sudoers syntax you can look at the original sudo man page.

Differences from original sudo

sudo-rs supports less functionality than sudo. Some of this is by design. In most cases you will get a clear error if you try something that is not supported (e.g. use a configuration flag or command line option that is not implemented).

Exceptions to the above, with respect to your /etc/sudoers configuration:

  • use_pty is enabled by default, but can be disabled.
  • env_reset is ignored --- this is always enabled.
  • visiblepw is ignored --- this is always disabled.
  • verifypw is currently ignored; a password is always necessary for sudo -v.
  • mail_badpass, always_set_home, always_query_group_plugin and match_group_by_gid are not applicable to our implementation, but ignored for compatibility reasons.

Some other notable restrictions to be aware of:

  • Some functionality is not yet supported; in particular sudoedit and preventing shell escapes using NOEXEC and NOINTERCEPT.
  • Per-user, per-command, per-host Defaults sudoers entries for finer-grained control are not (yet) supported.
  • Sudo-rs always uses PAM for authentication at this time, your system must be set up for PAM. Sudo-rs will use the sudo service configuration. This also means that resource limits, umasks, etc have to be configured via PAM and not through the sudoers file.
  • sudo-rs will not include the sendmail support of original sudo.
  • The sudoers file must be valid UTF-8.
  • To prevent a common configuration mistake in the sudoers file, wildcards are not supported in argument positions for a command. E.g., %sudoers ALL = /sbin/fsck* will allow sudo fsck and sudo fsck_exfat as expected, but %sudoers ALL = /bin/rm *.txt will not allow an operator to run sudo rm README.txt, nor sudo rm -rf /home .txt, as with original sudo.

If you find a common use case for original sudo missing, please create a feature request for it in our issue tracker.

Aim of the project

Our current target is to build a drop-in replacement for all common use cases of sudo. For the sudoers config syntax this means that we support the default configuration files of common Linux distributions. Our implementation should support all commonly used command line options from the original sudo implementation.

Some parts of the original sudo are explicitly not in scope. Sudo has a large and rich history and some of the features available in the original sudo implementation are largely unused or only available for legacy platforms. In order to determine which features make it we both consider whether the feature is relevant for modern systems, and whether it will receive at very least decent usage. Finally, of course, a feature should not compromise the safety of the whole program.

Our su implementation is made using the building blocks we created for our sudo implementation. It will be suitable replacement for the su distributed by util-linux.

Future work

While our initial target is a drop-in replacement for most basic use cases of sudo, our work may evolve beyond that target. We are also looking into alternative ways to configure sudo without the sudoers config file syntax and to extract parts of our work in usable crates for other people.

Sponsors

The initial development of sudo-rs was started and funded by the Internet Security Research Group as part of the Prossimo project.

An independent security audit of sudo-rs was made possible by the NLNet Foundation.