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Couldn't a malicious actor edit the temporary file without the user who invoked sudo -e noticing?


Perhaps, but you will still overwrite it when you exit the editor and let sudo copy the contents back (that being said, there might be a race condition between closing the editor and sudo noticing that the process has terminated). Not sure if this would work, but a possible workaround could be to use /dev/shm (https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand...).


The temporary file should be created in such a way that other users cannot modify it. If that does not happen, if other users can modify it, I would regard that as a bug.

Malicious processes running as the same user could potentially modify the file, but if you have malicious processes running as a user with sudo privileges you have probably already lost.


Yes, I think she can. I think this is better than running the whole editor as root.




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