Security Advisory

CVE-2021-4034

CVE vulnerability detail — eXtreme Datacenter Security Operations

Published 2022-01-28 00:00:00
Last updated 2025-10-21 23:15:48
Assigner redhat
State PUBLISHED

Description

A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkits 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 doesnt 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 itll 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.