Privilege Escalation Affecting freedesktop/polkit package, versions [0,]


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Attacked
EPSS
0.14% (51st percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-FREEDESKTOPPOLKIT-2766489
  • published17 Apr 2022
  • disclosed17 Apr 2022
  • creditQualys

Introduced: 17 Apr 2022

CVE-2021-4034  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-264  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

A fix was pushed into the master branch but not yet published.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Privilege Escalation via pkexec, due to not validating the argument count. The utility assumes the count will always be at least 1 and that the second value is either NULL or the command to be executed by pkexec as a privileged user. In case the argument array is empty, pkexec will interpret content from the environment array as the application to be executed. An attacker can leverage this by manipulating these variables to contain specific values and payloads, allowing it to be executed as a privileged user without any authentication to be requested.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1