How to increase sudo lock

Question

Recently I came across some documentation that stated that once sudo was successfully ran it stays unlocked for 5 minutes and can be reset through sudo -k. What I was wondering was how do I increase this 5 minute timer to say 10 minutes?

Answer 1

From man sudoers:

sudoers uses time stamp files for credential caching. Once a user has been authenticated, the time stamp is updated and the user may then use sudo without a password for a short period of time (15 minutes unless overridden by the timeout option). By default, sudoers uses a tty-based time stamp which means that there is a separate time stamp for each of a user's login sessions. The tty_tickets option can be disabled to force the use of a single time stamp for all of a user's sessions.

The "timeout" above refers to timestamp_timeout, also explained in man sudoers:

timestamp_timeout

Number of minutes that can elapse before sudo will ask for a passwd again. The timeout may include a fractional component if minute granularity is insufficient, for example 2.5. The default is 15. Set this to 0 to always prompt for a password. If set to a value less than 0 the user's time stamp will never expire. This can be used to allow users to create or delete their own time stamps via sudo -v and sudo -k respectively.

To modify the default setting of timestamp_timeout, edit the sudoers configuration using the sudo visudo command, and add a line near the top of the file like this:

# timeout after 30 minutes (instead of the default 15)
Defaults timestamp_timeout=30