So if I understand correctly, one of the most common flags is "sudo" and it means that the tool doesn't bother detecting whether it's operating with elevated privilege, and doesn't bother dropping those privileges when it doesn't need them, so you might coax it into doing other stuff while it's running.
I suppose that's a fundamental design flaw in POSIX setuid operations. Setting real/effective UID/GID in a process is persistent, and tools don't normally keep checking to see whether they have/need elevated privileges, and so this happens.
Now I expected this tag to mean something else. I expected there to be a list of tools that are commonly granted to ordinary users in the sudoers configuration, like the operator being able to kick off a backup. For example, "less" has a shell escape, and when running under sudo, it was possible to simply shell out and have an unrestricted root shell. I think that's fixed, but the moral of the story is not to grant sudo access to any tool that has shell escapes or arbitrary command execution.
I suppose that's a fundamental design flaw in POSIX setuid operations. Setting real/effective UID/GID in a process is persistent, and tools don't normally keep checking to see whether they have/need elevated privileges, and so this happens.
Now I expected this tag to mean something else. I expected there to be a list of tools that are commonly granted to ordinary users in the sudoers configuration, like the operator being able to kick off a backup. For example, "less" has a shell escape, and when running under sudo, it was possible to simply shell out and have an unrestricted root shell. I think that's fixed, but the moral of the story is not to grant sudo access to any tool that has shell escapes or arbitrary command execution.