Polkit Security Vulnerabilities

CVE-2013-4288

Race condition in PolicyKit (aka polkit) allows local users to bypass intended PolicyKit restrictions and gain privileges by starting a setuid or pkexec process before the authorization check is performed, related to (1) the polkit_unix_process_new API function, (2) the dbus API, or (3) the --proce...

CVE-2015-3218

The authentication_agent_new function in polkitbackend/polkitbackendinteractiveauthority.c in PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and polkitd daemon crash) by calling RegisterAuthenticationAgent with an invalid object path.

CVE-2015-3255

The polkit_backend_action_pool_init function in polkitbackend/polkitbackendactionpool.c in PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 might allow local users to gain privileges via duplicate action IDs in action descriptions.

CVE-2015-3256

PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and polkitd daemon crash) and possibly gain privileges via unspecified vectors, related to "javascript rule evaluation."

CVE-2015-4625

Integer overflow in the authentication_agent_new_cookie function in PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 allows local users to gain privileges by creating a large number of connections, which triggers the issuance of a duplicate cookie value.

CVE-2018-1116

A flaw was found in polkit before version 0.116. The implementation of the polkit_backend_interactive_authority_check_authorization function in polkitd allows to test for authentication and trigger authentication of unrelated processes owned by other users. This may result in a local DoS and inform...

CVE-2018-19788

A flaw was found in PolicyKit (aka polkit) 0.115 that allows a user with a uid greater than INT_MAX to successfully execute any systemctl command.

CVE-2019-6133

In PolicyKit (aka polkit) 0.115, the "start time" protection mechanism can be bypassed because fork() is not atomic, and therefore authorization decisions are improperly cached. This is related to lack of uid checking in polkitbackend/polkitbackendinteractiveauthority.c.

CVE-2021-3560

It was found that polkit could be tricked into bypassing the credential checks for D-Bus requests, elevating the privileges of the requestor to the root user. This flaw could be used by an unprivileged local attacker to, for example, create a new local administrator. The highest threat from this vu...

CVE-2021-4034

A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkit's pkexec utility. The pkexec application is a setuid tool designed to allow unprivileged users to run commands as privileged users according predefined policies. The current version of pkexec doesn't handle the calling parameters count ...

CVE-2021-4115

There is a flaw in polkit which can allow an unprivileged user to cause polkit to crash, due to process file descriptor exhaustion. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to availability. NOTE: Polkit process outage duration is tied to the failing process being reaped and a new one being spa...