Alpine Linux wants to replace sudo command with OpenBSD’s doas

The security-focused lightweight Linux distribution Alpine Linux is likely to switch from sudo to doas in the upcoming version. The developers consider the OpenBSD tool to be a simpler implementation of the sudo functionality.

Sudo will make the switch to the community repository when Alpine Linux 3.16 is released. The proposal is to replace this functionality with doas in the main repository. This is reported by the Alpine Linux development team in the release notes of the recently released Alpine Linux 3.15.

The proposal was initially submitted a year ago because doas would provide an easier implementation of the sudo functionality, and was worked out four months ago by the Alpine Linux security team. That team points out, among other things, that it now has to guarantee security updates for sudo for another two years. This would no longer be necessary when switching to doas. Doas has fewer functions than sudo, but is also less complex and has a smaller codebase, with advantages in management and security.

Doas was originally developed for OpenBSD as a sudo replacement and appeared in 2015 in version 5.8 of that OS. Alpine Linux is a compact Linux distro, focused on security and efficiency. It is built around the BusyBox collection of Unix tools.