CVE-2021-4034

State
Published
Severity
7.8 High
Published
Jan 28, 2022
Updated
Aug 15, 2026
Reserved
Nov 29, 2021

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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 correctly and ends trying to execute environment variables as commands. An attacker can leverage this by crafting environment variables in such a way it'll induce pkexec to execute arbitrary code. When successfully executed the attack can cause a local privilege escalation given unprivileged users administrative rights on the target machine.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.8 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HCISA-ADP

Weaknesses

Affected Products

ProductVersions
polkitn/a
  • allAffected

References

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