How severe is CVE-2023-42456?

CVE-2023-42456 has a CVSS score of 3.1/10, rated LOW. Review your exposure and patch according to your risk tolerance.

Which packages are affected by CVE-2023-42456?

CVE-2023-42456 affects the following packages: sudo-rs (crates.io). Ecosystems affected: crates.io.

How do I fix CVE-2023-42456?

Update sudo-rs to 0.2.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-42456 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

How do I detect CVE-2023-42456 in my crates.io dependencies?

Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for sudo-rs. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.

How do I mitigate CVE-2023-42456 if there is no patch (or I can't update yet)?

If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.

How does O3 Security protect against CVE-2023-42456?

O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2023-42456 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.

Is CVE-2023-42456 actively exploited in the wild?

No public exploit code has been indexed for CVE-2023-42456 yet. This does not mean the vulnerability cannot be exploited — absence of public exploits does not imply safety. Apply the recommended fix and use O3 Security to monitor your exposure.

What is the EPSS score for CVE-2023-42456?

CVE-2023-42456 has an EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) score of 0.6%, placing it in the 43th percentile of all CVEs. EPSS is maintained by FIRST.org and estimates the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. This score indicates relatively lower exploitation probability, though the CVSS severity should still guide your patching priority.

When was CVE-2023-42456 published, and has it been updated?

CVE-2023-42456 was published on September 21, 2023 and was last updated on April 10, 2026. Advisory data evolves as severity scores, affected ranges, and exploit intelligence are revised — always check the latest version of the advisory before acting.

🦀 crates.io

CVE-2023-42456

LOW

sudo-rs Session File Relative Path Traversal vulnerability

Also known asGHSA-2r3c-m6v7-9354RUSTSEC-2023-0069

Published

Sep 21, 2023

Updated

Apr 10, 2026

Affected

1 pkg

Patched

1 / 1

Exploits

None indexed

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗

0.6%probability of exploitation in next 30 days

Lower Risk43th percentile+0.44%

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.

Blast Radius

1 pkg affected

🦀sudo-rs

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

Sudo-rs, a memory safe implementation of sudo and su, allows users to not have to enter authentication at every sudo attempt, but instead only requiring authentication every once in a while in every terminal or process group. Only once a configurable timeout has passed will the user have to re-authenticate themselves. Supporting this functionality is a set of session files (timestamps) for each user, stored in /var/run/sudo-rs/ts. These files are named according to the username from which the sudo attempt is made (the origin user).

An issue was discovered in versions prior to 0.2.1 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.

The issue is patched 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 sudo -K and sudo -k commands can run, even if a user has no sudo access. As a workaround, make sure that one's system does not contain any users with a specially crafted username. While this is the case and while untrusted users do not have the ability to create arbitrary users on the system, one should not be able to exploit this issue.

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed

Ecosystem	Package	Vulnerable range	Fix
🦀crates.io	`sudo-rs`	all versions	0.2.1

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

Detect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for sudo-rs. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update sudo-rs to 0.2.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-42456 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2023-42456 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.

Tailored to CVE-2023-42456. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sudo-rs, a memory safe implementation of sudo and su, allows users to not have to enter authentication at every sudo attempt, but instead only requiring authentication every once in a while in every terminal or process group. Only once a configurable timeout has passed will the user have to re-authenticate themselves. Supporting this functionality is a set of session files (timestamps) for each user, stored in `/var/run/sudo-rs/ts`. These files are named according to the username from which the sudo attempt is made (the origin user). An issue was discovered in versions prior to 0.2.1 where us

O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

Is CVE-2023-42456 in your dependencies?

O3 detects CVE-2023-42456 across crates.io dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.

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