A Local Privilege Escalation vulnerability (from any user to root) was found in polkit's pkexec, a SUID-root program that is installed by default on every major Linux distribution.
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 vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.
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.
A flaw was found in PolicyKit (aka polkit) 0.115 that allows a user with a uid greater than INTMAX to successfully execute any systemctl command.
A flaw was found in polkit before version 0.116. The implementation of the polkitbackendinteractiveauthoritycheckauthorization 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 information disclosure.
Integer overflow in the authenticationagentnewcookie function in Po ...
Last updated 24 July 2024
It was reported that if polkit, while reading action descriptions from /usr/share/polkit-1/actions, encounters a duplicate action ID, it corrupts the heap. The effects of corruption are e.g. visible on stderr as frequent use of unrelated strings when running polkit without --no-debug.
Presumably a local attacker might be able to manipulate polkit’s heap enough to achieve privilege escalation through this.
Upstream bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/showbug.cgi?id=83590 Upstream patch is attached.
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 polkitunixprocessnew API function, (2) the dbus API, or (3) the --process (unix-process) option for authorization to pkcheck.