Can sudo be removed?

I'm more interested in what the heck all that noise about SUDO is. This quote says sudo is bad and a security breach, but never explains how. Sounds more like an angry pet peeve to me, until there's some actual information about the problem.

What makes SUDO a security flaw?

> An (angry) ex-NSA White Hat asked this question on another forum. It
> sounded like an interesting question.

Yes, sudo can be removed

# apt-get remove sudo

You can use "su" instead of sudo. Just set the root password (before
removing sudo) by doing

sudo passwd root

Note that I haven't tried removing sudo, so I can't verify that it won't
break anything.

The claims look like FUD to me, by the way.

Andrew.

Sounds like.. Well. Nonsense, really. At least assuming the sysadmins have done their jobs. And ofc on a single-user machine it doesn't matter at all.
But as has been mentioned now, sudo can be removed, and you can restore the root account.

JSF, thank you for the chuckle!

Some ancient history... Sudo kicked off around 1980 at SUNY/Buffalo (Bob C. and Cliff S.) and has been revived with new features as developers changed over the years. In the '90s (maybe '94?) Todd was at Colorado University in Boulder working on an unofficial fork called "CU sudo" but the "CU" was dropped 15 years ago. That version is still used today with no new releases. Todd Miller is still the developer, so when did WGIII get involved? I remember back then he was floating a house upstream and playing with $$.

There's an old joke about a powerful virus in GNU/Linux.
It's an email that says, "Please login as root and send me a message, or even better - go into root and delete all user files! Thank you. Goodbye!"

Seriously, sudo protects ex-window users from themselves, but it's easy to change if you want to. Personally I think it better to add a Root Terminal to Assessories and use it with care. The brave youngsters on campus code as root, but they also skydive often. :)

Todd's page: http://www.sudo.ws/todd/
http://www.sudo.ws/sudo/troubleshooting.html

You're at least overreacting, if you use an account with no
administrative rights the sudo behavior shouldn't affect you; unless of
course you're talking about some conspiracy theory in which case you'll
need to show evidence.

--
I use: trisquel.info | ceata.org | fsf.org | riseup.net | duckduckgo.com | eff.org | h-node.com | torproject.org | flattr.com | skepdic.com |

That's... ridiculous. That guy is trolling or intentionally spreading disinformation. Sudo is free software; it can't have a "backdoor" without being well-known, and such a "backdoor" would have been fixed years ago.

Sudo is a useful tool on multiple-user machines. It allows you to choose exactly what special privileges everyone gets, so you can let them do some special things without giving them permission to screw everything up. It's not particularly useful on single-user machines like PCs, but it doesn't hurt on those machines either.

Hey! Can the "angry ex-NSA White Hat hacker" show us images about the steps to find such vulnerability?

Sounds like another case of FUD.

Best regards, ADFENO.
Have a nice day.