SARA / Free Tools / CVE / CVE-2021-4034

CVE-2021-4034 — Red Hat Polkit Out-of-Bounds Read and Write Vulnerability

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

CVSS
EPSS
87.81% (top 0.50%)
CWE
CWE-787
Published
2022-01-28T00:00:00.000Z
Last modified
2025-10-21T23:15:48.549Z
CVSS vector
CISA KEV — Actively Exploited
Added to KEV
2022-06-27
BOD 22-01 due
2022-07-18
Ransomware use
Unknown

01What is this vulnerability?

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…

02Affected products

VendorProductVersions
na / polkitall

03Active exploitation status

Yes — actively exploited. Added to the CISA KEV catalog on 2022-06-27. Ransomware use: Unknown.

04Recommended remediation

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

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07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

09References

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