Actively exploited in the wild
Red Hat Polkit Incorrect Authorization Vulnerability
Red Hat - Polkit · Listed in the CISA KEV since 2023-05-12. This indicates confirmed attacks in production environments.
Required action: Apply updates per vendor instructions.
CVE-2021-3560
HighCVSS 7.8KEVSummary
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.
Risk Assessment
Risk of privilege escalation to root by a local user, potentially leading to full system compromise and data breach.
Recommendation
Update polkit to a patched version and monitor systems for unauthorized privilege changes.
Other vulnerabilities in polkit
See all- CVE-2025-14338High
In Polkit versions before v0.69.0, authentication is disabled by default and a race condition in the authorization check can lead to the same issues as in CVE-2025-66005.
- CVE-2021-4034HighActively exploited
A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found in polkit's pkexec utility. pkexec doesn't handle the calling parameters count correctly and ends trying to execute environment variables as commands.
- CVE-2026-4897Medium
A flaw was found in polkit. A local user can exploit this by providing a specially crafted, excessively long input to the `polkit-agent-helper-1` setuid binary via standard input (stdin). This unbounded input can lead to an out-of-memory (OOM) condition, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) for the system.
- CVE-2025-7519Medium
A flaw was found in polkit where an out-of-bounds write can occur when processing an XML policy with 32 or more nested elements. This can lead to a crash or other unexpected behavior, and arbitrary code execution is not discarded.
Original NVD description (English source)
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.