The problem is that almost all distros are forcing users to use sudo now.

What are the alternatives?

• Handing out the root password to everyone needing it?
• Using su? Full, unrestricted root for everyone? That's nearly as evil as handing out the root password.
• Using doas? The latter looks good, but is BSD-only.

sudo was designed to be safe, including restricting users to run only some commands as root, and optional logging. But it became too complex when it tried to prevent subshells running as root, e.g by injecting libraries (IIRC) and by filtering command parameters.

Using sudo just as a prefix for any command to be run as root is syntactically correct, but in this very common default configuration it is nothing more than a su replacement asking for the user password instead of the root password for all people being part of the wheel group (sudo group on Debian, because wheel is evil for some strange reason).

A safe sudo configuration is possible, but it requires a lot of time thinking through the capabilities of the sudo configuration. See below.

This particular exploit breaks a completely nonsense feature, echoing a * for every character of the password typed in, which is OFF by default. Linux distributions became vulnerable to this exploit when they messed with the configuration of sudo.

sudo has a problem: Too many features. doas fixes that for *BSD.

sudo has two other problems: An unusual config file format and a man page for that starts with "how to read this manual". https://xkcd.com/1343/. My favorite heading is "Quick guide to EBNF". Yes, it may be technically correct, but it is on the far right side of the xkcd.

Alexander