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sudo su not asking password even after changing password


Govind
(@govind)
Member Admin
Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 1
Topic starter  

I have an ubuntu instance on AWS.

After getting ssh login, I was able to change to root password with sudo su command.
For security reasons, I wanted to change the root password. So I tried the following :

root@email:/home/ubuntu# sudo passwd root
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
root@email:/home/ubuntu#

After changing the password when I try to sudo su, it doesn't ask for password

ubuntu@email:~$ sudo su
root@email:/home/ubuntu#

Whereas, when I try only su, it prompts for one:

ubuntu@email:~$ su
Password:

How to implement security or set a password for sudo su?

This topic was modified 3 years ago by Govind

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myTechMint
(@mytechmint)
Member Moderator
Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 52
 

This line in your sudoers file

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d
makes it include other files from /etc/sudoers.d/ directory. One of these included files probably sets a rule with NOPASSWD that causes the issue.

Before you change something, make sure your regular user has a valid nonempty password. You can check this to set password for a user in Linux.

sudo will ask for a password even when you don't have one, and won't accept an empty password. When in doubt, invoke passwd and set a brand new password for your regular user.

Then edit files in the directory /etc/sudoers.d/
Look for lines like

ubuntu ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Do

nano /etc/sudoers.d/

and comment out lines similar to above ones, So that it will looks like this

#ubuntu ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
This post was modified 3 years ago by myTechMint

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