Google has issued an urgent security update for its Chrome browser, addressing a critical zero-day vulnerability that is being actively exploited by attackers.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-6554, is a type confusion vulnerability in Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, which underpins the browser’s ability to process web content across Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms.
The vulnerability was discovered by Clément Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) on June 25, 2025. According to Google, attackers have already developed and deployed exploits targeting this flaw in the wild, prompting the company to act quickly.
The Sudo utility is a privileged command-line tool installed on Linux systems that allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser, or another user, as specified by the security policy. It is commonly used to implement the least privilege model by delegating administrative tasks that require elevated privileges without sharing the root password, while also creating an audit trail in the system log.
The Stratascale Cyber Research Unit (CRU) team discovered two local privilege vulnerabilities in Sudo. These vulnerabilities can result in the escalation of privileges to root on the impacted system.
The research focused on infrequently used command-line options. This blog explores how the Sudo chroot option can be leveraged by any local user to elevate privileges to root, even if no Sudo rules are defined for that user.
The default Sudo configuration is vulnerable. Although the vulnerability involves the Sudo chroot feature, it does not require any Sudo rules to be defined for the user. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed. The following versions are known to be vulnerable. Note: Not all versions within the range have been tested.
Stable 1.9.14 - 1.9.17
Note: The legacy versions of Sudo (currently <= 1.8.32) are not vulnerable because the chroot feature does not exist.
Exploitation has been verified on:
Ubuntu 24.04.1; Sudo 1.9.15p5, Sudo 1.9.16p2
Fedora 41 Server; Sudo 1.9.15p5
