Vulnerability Intelligence Report
Red Hat Polkit Out-of-Bounds Read and Write Vulnerability
CVE-2021-4034
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.
CISA KEV
SSVC: Active Exploitation
CVSS Base Score
7.8
HIGH
Exploitability:1.9
Impact Score:5.9
EPSS Probability:94.92%
Executive Threat Verdict
Evaluating...
Evaluating Threat Landscape...
Assessing known weaponization, exploitation telemetry, and federal advisories.
Attack Surface
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Authentication
—
Weaponization
—
SSVC Action
—
Weaknesses (CWE)
CWE-787 ↗(CWE-787|CWE-125)
Affected Products & Versions
| Vendor | Product | Affected Versions |
|---|---|---|
| n/a | polkit | all (affected) |
References & Technical Advisories
No reference links found.
Threat Intelligence Signals
Identity & Timeline
| Status | PUBLISHED |
| Assigning Authority | Red Hat, Inc. · Vendor · USA |
| Reserved | 2021-11-29T00:00:00 |
| Published | 2022-01-28T00:00:00 |
| Last Updated | 2026-08-15T03:55:29 |
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