KDE kdelibs before 4.14 and kauth before 5.1 does not properly use D-Bus for communication with a polkit authority, which allows local users to bypass intended access restrictions by leveraging a PolkitUnixProcess PolkitSubject race condition via a (1) setuid process or (2) pkexec process, related to CVE-2013-4288 and "PID reuse race conditions."

KAuth contains a logic flaw in which the service invoking dbus is not properly checked. This allows spoofing the identity of the caller and with some carefully crafted calls can lead to gaining root from an unprivileged account.

Affected versions: kauth < 5.34, kdelibs < 4.14.32

Upstream patches:

kauth: https://commits.kde.org/kauth/df875f725293af53399f5146362eb158b4f9216a kdelibs: https://commits.kde.org/kdelibs/264e97625abe2e0334f97de17f6ffb52582888ab

External References:

https://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20170510-1.txt http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q2/240

KDE KAuth before 5.55 allows the passing of parameters with arbitrary types to helpers running as root over DBus via DBusHelperProxy.cpp. Certain types can cause crashes, and trigger the decoding of arbitrary images with dynamically loaded plugins. In other words, KAuth unintentionally causes this plugin code to run as root, which increases the severity of any possible exploitation of a plugin vulnerability.