Is disabling sudo password prompt a security risk?

Question

I was reading the this question over on Ask Ubuntu and they suggest adding the following line to etc/sudoers so that you're not prompted to enter your password each time you run sudo

%admin  ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Is this a security risk and if so, what are some ways people can exploit this?

Yes, it's a security risk, but if somebody gains access to an account of the `admin` group, you're already in trouble. It's rather easy to create an alias that executes malicious code that will be executed the instead of the actual `sudo` command. — Dennis, Jan 09 '16 at 06:23
Does this answer your question? [How secure is NOPASSWD in passwordless sudo mode?](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/45712/how-secure-is-nopasswd-in-passwordless-sudo-mode) — Steffen Ullrich, Sep 06 '20 at 05:38

score 27 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 08 '16 at 19:57

27

Yes, it's a risk. Anyone who touches your keyboard can get root access by running sudo and not worrying about your password. Anyone who has an exploit that gets them userland access can instantly get root access using the sudo command. This reduces isolation and increases the effort to recover from an attack or intrusion.

edited Jan 08 '16 at 19:57

Neil Smithline

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answered Jan 08 '16 at 19:31

Adam Shostack

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Good thing this is isn't done by default on the world's most used VPS....... oh, wait... – Billy left SE for Codidact Jan 09 '16 at 09:30
@BillyC. which VPS is that? – jwerre Aug 17 '17 at 23:05
Amazon..... EC2....... – Billy left SE for Codidact Aug 17 '17 at 23:07
Do we know if AWS provided any justification for this? They don't take security lightly so I suppose there must be some reason they've done it this way.. – Rushi Agrawal Sep 24 '22 at 04:24

Is disabling sudo password prompt a security risk?

1 Answers1